Why do schools finish at 3?

[snowdropsandcrocuses]

Genuine question but before teachers come gunning for me, let me explain.

In particular I am referring to secondary schools here and have just been reading the thread on teachers having ridiculously short lunch breaks which got me thinking.

Why is there such a rush to finish school early? Finishing school at 4pm for example, would allow longer lunch breaks (giving teachers and pupils a full break plus allowing lunch clubs more time), could factor in a little more transition time and just take a bit of pressure off. It would definitely help parents as well. I'm struggling to see the negatives. This is not to say I want teachers to work even harder because I don't but I wonder if there is a particular mandate that dictates the maximum 'opening hours' of comprehensive schools?

It massively depends on the demographic you teach.

Affluent area, engaged parents, reasonable behaviour? No problem, an hour is fine.

Deprived area, many pupils with chaotic home lives, gang presence? Total nightmare.

DDs' school gives 35 minutes between periods 2&3, then 25 minutes between periods 4&5. The main lunch is 11am-11.35am. 2nd break is 13.35-14.00. School hours 08.30-15.00 with 1 hour lessons.

They do lots of extra-curriculars in first break, during tutor time, or after school.

TempsPerdu My DC is at a state grammar and they have the longest school day of all the local schools finish at 3.45 inc hour lunch. Another reason for longer day is they have break between lessons as staff need to go to sixth form site too (the other schools don’t have sixth forms) They have clubs at lunch and now yr 11 a lot of extra revision classes at lunch run by teachers.
My brother went to a high achieving comp on an 8-2 continental timetable but lots of extra curricular inc sport, extra gcses etc.

@user1471443411

The problem with having clubs after school is the children that travel by bus won't be able to attend unless they can get a lift. Then many children won't attend anyway as they'd rather go home, whereas if the club had been at lunch time they would have done. Maybe someone could make these points to the Conservatives as part of their 'levelling up' agenda (children from deprived areas not having access to lunchtime clubs at school and sometimes not even time to eat lunch). All they seem to want to do though is keep children at school for more hours altogether.

Don't get me started on that.

In my opinion the single best thing the government could do is to restrict porn to over 18's

Because the absolute worst thing to happen to our children today (in my humble opinion) is to expose the young, hormonal youths (especially males) to hardcore pornography which is leading to sexual assaults and horrific acts between children too young to comprehend the damage they are inflicting and/or experiencing

Because it’s been proven that kids learn better in the morning. After lunch learning isn’t as good and far more disruption.
It’s why the schools with more ‘challenging behaviour’ start early and are finished by 2:30 in some cases

The early end does provide time for extracurricular activities in higher levels. Sports team practices, extra orchestra rehearsals, the school play.

The four secondary schools in my area all have a number of buses to transport children from the outlying villages. They don't have the opportunity to stay on after school unless their parents are happy for them to travel in the dark on service buses to rural areas, if they're even an option.

The secondaries in my area finish at half 3 ish. Some finish early on a Friday. They start slightly earlier as a result. Friend works in one that does this and part of the reason is to give teachers a solid afternoon for PPA, training, meetings etc. Other reasons too and it works well.

My (private) school finishes at 3:45 for pre prep and 4 in the prep. The last hour for the youngest (reception and year1) is tricky - they’ve had it and are zonked by then. Older kids vary - some seem to manage fine but I certainly can’t imagine much meaningful learning past 4. To be honest 3 is basically a deadline across the board because you loose them by then. Remember by the it could easily be 6th period of the day.

Mine have a solid hours play. For many it’s too much. An hour is a long time and the last half is when arguments start and boredom sets in and they get cold and, while it’s great for me if I don’t have duty, I would actually support a shorter main lunch break for my lot and a little 15 minute break moved to the afternoon - but lunch supervisors have gone by then so it wouldn’t be a staff break.

Secondary school lunch breaks can go to mayhem quickly. I don’t think a longer one would really help anyone in reality. Teachers wouldn’t get extra break because they would probably have to do clubs instead and the risk of carnage would increase.

When I was at secondary school we finished at 4pm every day. It was a private school. Maybe the parents wanted their money's worth!

No. Teachers are contracted to 1265 hours a year to cover meetings, lessons, parents' evenings and open evenings - non-negotiable hours where their HT can direct them to be doing something specific.
A classroom teacher will likely have 22 hours lessons per week and maybe 3 hours in which to plan (legally, they are required to have at least 10% of their timetable as planning time so many will have less), prepare and resource everything for those 22 hours. Anything which doesn't get done in those 3 hours has to be done outside of school hours. As a PP mentioned, it can take around 30 mins to plan, resource and photocopy for a lesson and 10-15 mins per student to mark their work - I teach English so we mark extended writing.
So that's:
22 x 30 mins = 11 hours
30 (books) x 15mins = 7.5 hours
x 5(classes) = 37.5 hours

In total, around 48 hours of work to do in 3 'directed' hours. There is no paid overtime and these hours don't include extra data/admin tasks, detentions, helping students with homework, sitting with a y7 who has come in crying, spending break times with y11s who need to just clarify something, marking mock papers on top of the usual marking cycle, inputting results into spreadsheets, phonecalls to parents, report writing, etc etc etc.
I don't know any teacher who has any more to give and, unfortunately, as PP have mentioned, a longer lunch break wouldn't allow most teachers to work any more, as they would end up on crowd control duty.

So I’m my school, we start at 8.20am and previously finished at 3pm with a 35 min lunch. This has recently been reduced to 25 mins and finishing at 2.50pm.
main reasons are

1. Behaviour just gets worse and worse over lunch.
2. No supervisors - dinner ladies seem to be gone, we only have catering staff that stay in the kitchen. There are daily emails begging for teaching staff to cover lunches as no one wants to do it (we are paid and have free dinner for it)
3. Brand new school building is massively too small, we can only accommodate 15% of students in the canteen at one time, so the rest have to be outside in all weathers.
4. Last lesson kids are more badly behaved and struggle to concentrate so making it even later would be even worse. We have students who routinely fall asleep in lessons because they stay up all night on phones/games - they are knackered by 2pm!

My school ended at just before 4. We had a long lunch break (hour 10 minutes when there was assembly/form time, hour and a half (!) when it was cancelled). I hated it and thought it was a massive waste of time. It's all very well to say clubs, but IME schools don't offer so many clubs that most kids will have a fixed activity most days (because there is a small choice of clubs, they're not to a wide range of interests - remember staff need to be running them too) and all the others "suffer" along with them. Originally from a country with more breaks, but where even the "long" break was much shorter (30 mins, I think?). I don't see the need to keep children in school for longer hours for the sake apparently of getting them "out of the way" somehow.

It costs money to pay for lunch time staffing. Budgets were cut massively a few years ago. We lost some of our lunch time staff. We only have 1 dinner lady as a result and teachers have to help serve as there isn't money to even cover the cost of food let alone staffing.

That’s an early start, @Spottybotty20

We start at 840, although are supposed to be on site at 825. It’s always such a rush as have to drop my toddler at nursery then drive across town!

Buses
Intervention after school every night or meetings takes you up to about 430. Then sorting all your shit out for the next day (moving books round/ organising photocopying/ phoning parentsetc).

I tend to leave work around 515ish as I need to do my own child pick up before 6.

Then the work I didn't manage to get done before I left gets done at home.

Some secondary schools where I am finish at 2.30,
Most finish at 3, the one near me finishes at 3, earlier than my kids primary school

@DarlingDarwin

All the teachers I know insist they work til 8pm most days anyway, so why not have the kids a bit longer.

This makes me so sad

You’re not valuing the people who are putting the work into educating your child at all

It’s just childcare.

I feel sorry for all these kids whose schools solution to them needing to let off steam is to stamp down on it. That’s only going to exacerbate the problem.

It must be scary trying to crowd control that many bairns so outnumbered though. Teachers have my sympathy

The truth is that lunchtimes shortened to remove behaviour problems. If you only give 30mins for lunch, that's 5 mins at least travel time each end, 15mins in the queue and 5 mins to neck your lunch before next lesson. There's no time to go out on the field and run around and get into fights/climb over fences/get up to mischief. So schools don't have to pay for supervision on the grounds at lunchtime, because everyone is in the lunch queue with the 'lunchtime supervisors'.

The other issue is that school buildings are not fit for purpose, canteens can not serve 1800 students in one go, so schools now tend to split lunch, whereby half the students (and staff) are in lessons while the other half have their 30minute lunch break.

I don't recall my teaching colleagues ever asking for this change so we could go home earlier. In fact I remember lots of resistance to it. I'd go home at the same time regardless (6pm to pick up kids), so I could do my at-school prep/marking at lunchtime rather than after school. Or I could take a proper break at lunchtime, sit in the staff room letting off a bit of steam with my colleagues. We even used to have time to go to the pub for lunch at one point.

We have 2 long days 9 - 3.55 and 3 short days 9-2.55. The long days are a problem as s1-s3 have lunch at 11.45 so it’s a long afternoon.

@Chickenavocadobacon we have a ridiculously long registration in the morning (I don’t have a form class which is great!) my husband starts work at 10 so they all stay in bed while I leave!

No teachers don't earn overtime, and I'm not sure it really balances out over the year. The 1265 hours we're directed is when we are told we need to physically be somewhere, in front of a class, in a meeting, in a parents evening, on duty etc. It includes hardly any of the time needed to actually do the job. The vast majority of the time needed to plan, mark, respond to emails (oh the 1000s of emails), contact parents etc is not accounted for in our contracted hours, nor is it paid as overtime, nor as time in lieu. The holidays are long, but I'm not sure an extended holiday quite makes up for the 50+ hours regularly worked a week in term time. It's not like my family exist in school holidays only, they're there all year and my kids need their mum all year.

But I digress, on to the lunchtime issue. Yes, hundreds of teenagers do need supervision during a lunch break. Yes most are perfectly well behaved, but a minority are not, and that minority need adult supervision. I'd love a 45 min lunch break rather than 30 minutes, but we have found that we have less issues with behaviour when it's only 30 minutes. Plus we don't have enough space for them at lunch, extending our current buildings is another thing we have no money for, so we actually have two lunch breaks to accommodate them all (teachers are in timetabled lessons when not on their half hour lunch break). Schools are so short of money, I think everyone knows that, but Academies aren't really the problem (although CEO pay doesn't help, we didn't have CEOs before schools were Academies), chronic, sustained underfunding over more than an decade by the current government is the problem. Adding any extra time to the school day, whether it's at lunch or at the end of the day or whenever, costs money so it simply can't happen. Whether you believe it or not, any extra time when students are in school needs adequate supervision, and it needs the site staff and appropriate support staff on site, and the lights and heating on etc. And it needs enough space for those students to actually be somewhere, if not in a lesson with a tracher. So a longer day is impossible at the moment I'm afraid, with funding as limited as it is.

Back in the old days, when I was in school, lunch was an hour.

It was shit.
Once you'd eaten lunch, you'd just wander about in the cold, trying to keep your head down, until it was time for lessons again. The boys would play football.
At least in yr 11 you could escape.

Can you imagine letting yr11 out at lunch time now?

A bit of a continental perspective: in high school, the school day would typically be 9 am to 5 pm. Sometimes (because timetables are weird depending on year group and which optional modules you've taken), 8 am to 6 pm! And sometimes 10 am to 4 pm... Can vary a lot depending on the day...
Lunch break is at least 1 hour between midday and 2 pm, sometimes 2 hours. You can go and have lunch outside school (home or a cafe, etc.), or have it at school. There's also lunch time clubs.

So yeah, rigid British timetable stopping at 3pm with no time for lunch is really weird. There's no reason things MUST be like that, it's just a choice.

@WonderfulYou

I’d like to experience a school in a different country like France where I assume lunchtimes are longer and see how they manage their behaviour.

I think you would also need to look wider. It is cultural. A long lunch, shared social time, good food. Part of French culture.

How many of our teenagers experience this at home in the Uk?
How many sit around the table, as a social occasion with their family?How many eat, make and appreciate good simple food?

Expectations in the UK are so different.

In my setting all of the worst behaviour happens at lunchtime so I wouldn't want it to be longer then make the day longer too. Behaviour would deteriorate.
A lot of secondary schools round here have gone the other way.
Open early (8.30) short half hour lunch then close between 2-2.30pm.

@DarlingDarwin

All the teachers I know insist they work til 8pm most days anyway, so why not have the kids a bit longer.

Because they wouldn’t be able to do the prep and marking they need to do, whilst they had the children there.

Is that difficult to understand?!