Schools 3 day a week?

[Sunflowerkeep]

Is this for real or just media again? Is it seriously being considered?

School in lots of countries is 8 am to 1 pm . Maybe this is something being considered ? Kids spend to much time in school . The true issue is childcare not that less hours a week would be detrimental in any way

Children do not spend too much time in schools.

Most secondary schools in Ireland do a 4&1/2 day week now - half day Fridays!
Some schools opted for shorter days over the 5 days, but majority went with the shorter week.
Mine have left now but it worked well for us

But teachers already say they struggle to fit the curriculum in. So what would be axed? Probably sport.

I'm a teacher and union rep - never heard of it.

I’m sure turning down a few radiators will help them find another hundred thousand pounds.

This

I’m sure turning down a few radiators will help them find another hundred thousand pounds

Most schools are bloody freezing even with the radiators on. And do they still have to keep windows open for ventilation?

And yet Jess Phillip’s child’s school closes on Friday afternoons because they don’t have the money to run a full 5 days a week.

@HowManyTurtles as with COVID what is the economic impact of shutting schools even one day a week. Parents need to go out to work and you are on about spending more tax money tablets and Wi-Fi which parents should be providing.

Would be interesting if we gave parents the 7k (make it even for all children) then they could decide where that is spent. It would take the sting out of private school fees for a lot of parents and create a competitive environment where parents can choose to top it up and get X school or not and get Y.

I'm a TA and hope this doesn't happen. The children have missed lots of school already. There would be no winners.

I'm already loosely job hunting, but if I was suddenly only getting 3/5ths pay that is immediately unsustainable.

But there's a recruitment crisis already amongst support staff, with the last vacancy taking a year to fill. There is no money. And no one can afford to take low paid jobs at present, even if you get the holidays off.

I can imagine that the heating won't be on as much though. I'd rather not be cold at work and at home though.

Turning the heating down a bit isn’t going to make a blind bit of difference with the additional funds needed here-it’s way bigger than that.

In the 80s, the school I went to cut the day to 08:45 to 14:15. I can see this happening again to lower running costs, especially as TAs are paid hourly. I suspect that rather than having four classes of 28 students, we'll end up with three with 37. Schools will just employ fewer teachers to cope with paying the ones they have.

Ain’t going to happen.

I was just reading about how in the 70s hundreds of schools in the winter were closed due to a shortage of heating oil.

Fast forward to today and the response would be 'No heating? That's a great way to keep the bills down 👍'

No, schools won't go to a 3 day week. But if that idea is appalling, what about the idea that schools will have to run on a budget that would only allow schools to run effectively for 3 days a week, that they're having to stretch over 5? The consequences of that will also be appalling.

Some people only seem to care about schools when there's a possibility that they might close though.

I was in that cohort of 70’s kids. We also had caretaker strikes going off too. It was my O level year. We missed 6 weeks of school.

Still got my o levels though.

@noblegiraffe it’s like schools being kept open in COVID times with non-qualified/different subject leads covering classes for staff off with COVID. Parents happy that school open but disregarding the fact that their children were receiving little or no education

I don’t think it will happen.

I think that the situation with school budgets is unbelievably dire though. More so than people realise. Yes, schools can run deficit budgets, but a lot of schools have been running deficit budgets for years. This means that they spend more and more money servicing debt every year. Many schools are also reaching the limit of the amount of debt that they can realistically accumulate.

In many schools what this means is fewer support staff, larger class sizes, poorer resources, more unqualified teachers, and more students being taught subjects in secondary by non-specialists.

There was a documentary a few years back looking at funding issues in schools, where a school was having to consider teaching some GCSE English to classes of 60
in the main hall. They didn’t do it in the end as some of the SLT insisted it was bonkers but there might be schools left with no other choice soon.

It’s patently ridiculous to expect schools to fund pay increases out of existing budgets when they were already allocated months ago. Either they should make decisions on pay for the following September at the end of the financial (not academic) year, or they should fund them. I mean, lets be honest, they should just fund them. Kids shouldn’t have to go without textbooks so that their teachers can pay their fuel bills.

Don't think Academies can run deficits long-term

The goverment will soon change that when they realise that the funding they are providing doesn’t allow for anything but running at a deficit

Vic Goddard (Head from Educating Essex) has just tweeted that his school's increased costs are £320,000. A MAT CEO says theirs are £520,000 just from the pay awards and have no idea what the impact of energy increases will be when their contract runs out in April.

Another MAT CEO says they phoned the ESFA (Education and Skills Funding Agency) who said that they should use their reserves to pay for the increases. What reserves?

We are well beyond "Well maybe schools should consider turning down the radiators" territory. Hundreds of thousands of pounds in savings need to be found.

This is madness, and the govt are taking the piss in refusing to address it. Heads must be tearing their hair out.

twitter.com/vicgoddard/status/1559923071456366594?s=21&t=mIbbO3SQLneO1LipRRNBkA

I am so pleased I have fought so hard for a water tight ehcp for ds which clearly states his 1-1 need. Sadly I can see that being an area that many schools end up cutting back on to save because good quality special needs provision is expensive and what local authorities provide often doesn’t come close.

If teachers go on strike it will help budgets a bit!

where a school was having to consider teaching some GCSE English to classes of 60 in the main hall.

DS actually had this and he actually like it had frankly we were relived but he'd had three months of ad hoc supply often not English specialist teachers by then. Still has to sit English Lit GCSE end of Y10. Other departments lost teaching staff as well but not took so long to sort. We tried to do fair bit at home to support him but will find out how badly this affected him next week.

@noblegiraffe would those be the same reserves that the Government tell Academies to maintain under Charity Law (usually at least one months expenses including staff costs)

'5. The importance of reserves
The AFH, paragraph 2.10, reminds trustees that they must approve a balanced budget, taking into account brought forward reserves. Academy trusts are expected to maintain reserves, as they are standalone charitable companies. The AFH also states that the board of trustees must notify ESFA within 14 days if proposing a deficit revenue budget for the current financial year which it cannot address after considering unspent funds from previous years.'