Longer school day and shorter holidays, proposes Gove

[Morebiscuitsplease]

I cannot understand this man. Children need time out, teachers also need time to prepare and mark work, when do either get this with such proposals? We complain our children are obese yet suggest more time in school. I do not want any child of mine going to school for 7.30 and finishing at 5. They need time to play, pursue other activities and do homework. Your thoughts please!

Clearly the teachers' contracts and working day have to be reorganised so that teachers do not teach 9 - 5 solid then go home to do 2 more hours. However if afternoons were for sport/drama and other activities requiring a lower staff/pupil ratio then teachers could have 2 afternoons a week to do marking and holidays to do lesson planning. In fact, I dont know why the Govt dont just put all NC teaching material on the web with a lesson plan to cut down on teachers having to reinvent the wheel.

mumblechum - I'm sure the school serves food at some point in the day. I'm only talking about fresh fruit juice, toast, cereal for breakfast and maybe sandwiches, drinks, youghurts, fruit, a piece of cake for tea to keep them going.

I do think we have to rethink the structure of schooling. Our current systems are based on a Victorian model aimed at producing factory workers and homemakers, on the assumption that one parent will always be at home. These days life is more complicated and we could usefully adapt schools to meet the needs of modern children and their families. However we need to factor in the needs of children and teachers properly. For example, children need down time, and personally affectionate relationships with a range of adults, both of which are difficult in large, echoey schools with tired teachers. Teachers need time during the day to draw breath, rest, eat properly, and reflect on what they are doing, as well as the opportunity to maintain their own personal relationships, home lives, and attend to the needs of any children they have. With a more intelligent approach to planning perhaps we could revolutionise schooling to this end. However I fear all we will end up with is institutionalised children and fractious teachers.

So, as a teacher, I'd be in school from 6am until well after 10pm so I could prepare. When would I see my own child?

MoreBeta: " I dont know why the Govt dont just put all NC teaching material on the web with a lesson plan to cut down on teachers having to reinvent the wheel."

SERIOUSLY?

Oh my god, MoreBeta, do you seriously think teachers can just print off a plan and follow it? And that a generic plan will suit every class in the country?? I don't know how you have such a weird understanding of teaching, it's clear you went to school and are quite intelligent. You do realise that teachers have to adapt every single thing they do, right down to the activities they do in PE, to the unique children they teach? You absolutely cannot just print off a lesson plan from the internet and parrot it off - surely if it was that simple a robot could teach just as well?

CallinDana, if you track back some of the early educational practices for very young children in school, you see naps, teeth cleaning, and all sorts of things we have ditched in favour of treating them like little office workers.

If you ran infants schools like day nurseries with the children's physical needs met in a more appropriate way, you would get great dividends in terms of developmental and educational outcomes, I am sure.

morebeta

i am not making widgets in a factory. there is not an exemplar lesson on how to introduce the idea of moles (in Chemistry) for example that is going to fit all classes. I need to think carefully about the needs of all the learners in my classes. The kinds of activities, how long they take, their focus etc are all things that may vary, as well as how well the students take to the material. One class may need a lot of support, while another can be stretched because they grasped the basics quickly.

This isn't something I can do far in advance in my holidays - it needs to be ongoing during the term. I can write general schemes of work for topics where i plan possible activities and seuqences of learning, and match them to resources, but the real work of how am I going to teach this concept to this particular class has to happen while I am in the process of teaching them - i.e. during term time

Careful planning that thinks deeply and reflectively on how to meet the needs of a particular class of particular students is something that I feel is of critical importance. It isn't the only thing, but it isn't something that can be managed by whacking generic lesson plans on the internet.

I totally agree BoffinMum, put parents won't have it. IME if teachers attempt to carry out any activity during the day that is not strictly educational then there are complaints left right and centre.

I think it would work if it was clear what the philosophy was underpinning it and exactly how it fed into outcomes. Half the problem is that sometimes these activities are used as smokescreens to disguise the fact that too many supply staff are being used or whatever, whereas if it was made clear at induction to parents what the master plan for the children's development was, along with the underpinning science, then I think parents would have a lot more confidence.

Morebeta, our school does not serve food at any time during the day, and there are no facilities for doing so. Children bring their lunches in lunch boxes and take home any wrappers to put in their bins at home.

'However if afternoons were for sport/drama and other activities requiring a lower staff/pupil ratio then teachers could have 2 afternoons a week to do marking and holidays to do lesson planning.'

Why does a PE lesson need a lower staff/pupil ratio?? I teach literacy to 27 children, and I teach PE to 27 children. Who else would teach PE if I wasn't there?
Teachers have to plan lessons using their assessments of what children have learnt THAT DAY. They can't plan next term's lessons over the holidays! For instance, in numeracy, I broadly plan what I'm doing that week, teach an introductory lesson (already tailored for ability), and each night re-plan according to how the children have responded. Teaching is a fluid process and is dependent on a continuous assessment of the children's learning.

Chibi put it very well - planning is an ongoing thing that sometimes has to change from day to day as well as from week to week - it's definitely not something you can lay out over the summer holidays and then follow blindly until the next holiday.

For example I might lay out a plan to teach maths that says I will spend one week on fractions. I might start fractions on Monday to find that actually over the summer a lot of children have forgotten their tables and are really struggling with the idea of dividing by 2 or multiplying by 4. So, I have to spend Tuesday refreshing them on their tables and then go back to fractions (all going well) on Wednesday, which mean my whole week's plan is out of whack and therefore the following week is messed up too.

I might also find that some of the materials I'm planning on using are too easy or too difficult or they don't quite focus on the things the children need the most help with, so I have to spend two hours on Wednesday afternoon sourcing new material, laying it out in a sensible way, printing it off, guillotining it so it'll fit in the children's books and arranging it according to the different maths groups. Remember that's all just for one subject, once I've done that I'll still have to mark English books, get the Science topic ready, print off homework, mark homework, call a parent about something, have a quick meeting about next week's field trip etc etc. The idea that teachers can just print off a plan then head to the pub is just barmy.

I despair at the idea of shorter summer hols.

6 weeks of clamour for campsite bookings / ferries / traffic jams for the SW, will all be squashed into 3 or 4 weeks?

ALL parents will want hol from work in the same short slot.

The hospitality trade will suffer horribly, surely?

More holiday in the freezing cold wet dark months? Fab. Not.

Independent schools seem to manage this length of a school day without a) teachers burning out and b) the children becoming obese.

MoreBeta - I'd also like to know where you get the idea that drama or PE requires a lower staff/pupil ratio. In most of the places I taught the staff/pupil ratio was 1/30 - how much lower can it get?? Sometimes there was a TA but TAs are not qualified to teach and so I can't just wander off and leave the TA to teach the class - you can imagine the outrage that would rain upon the school if that was done!

independent schools have longer holidays than state schools

the actual time spent in lessons probably is similar

'Independent schools seem to manage this length of a school day without a) teachers burning out and b) the children becoming obese.'

Because they have other teachers to teach music and sports.
I have to teach all subjects to the teachers in my class. I can't go to have downtime when the children all swan off to ballet or cricket.

My dd's state secondary school has different teachers for every subject. My ds's independent secondary school has fewer teachers doing more subjects.

DD school day 9-3
DS school day 8.15-5.45

DS usually gets about 2 days more holiday than his sister, but doesn't have inset days that his sister gets out, so number of days off school is normally the same during an academic year.

I strongly get the feeling that some teachers and teraching unions are not willing to contemplate any change to how the school day or school year works. Ludite is a phrase that comes to mind. Resistance to change for the sake of resistance and clinging to an outdated ideology and closed shop working practices.

I heard on TV the other day a shocking statistic that 50% of the membership of the Labour Party is now made up of teachers. Tells me everything I need to know about why teaching unions will not engage with Gove. Society and parents are crying out for a change in the way we educate children. There are lots of young grads out of work and established teachers are not indispensible when all is said and done.

BoffinMum - it is based on a Victorian model of Mum at home and children with long summer holidays to help bring in the harvest. The school year was designed back then to fit in with the realities of life and the economy for that time. We need to move it on now to suit our a 24/7 'always on' information age society.

Agree with Boofinmum.

I do find it odd with schools that we seem to have to accept the same model (in terms of structure of day) that has been in operation for donkeys years.

The tertiary education sector have had to change to meet the demands of society now, and I don't think a SENSIBLE review (not just based on money-savings) on the primary and secondary sector would be a bad thing.

3 fewer children in the class saves you about 2 hours a week in marking and preparation. That's a lot. Smaller class sizes will equate to less work for the teacher, and seeing as independent schools tend to have smaller classes, it makes sense that teachers are able to put more time into actually teaching. Change do you have any statistics on the turnover of teachers in independent schools as opposed to state schools? I haven't come across any evidence that teachers last longer in independent schools.

morebeta, i really want to engage with the substance of your argument, but i am having trouble identifying it

you suggested we extend the school day, such that time now spent planning can be done in holidays

teachers explained why this might not be good in terms of improving attainment and pupil learning

you called teachers resistant to change, and luddites

as a teacher, i wopuld want more clarification as to what a longer school day means. is it longer with respect to activities, or increased teaching time? how will it be practically managed?

I would argue that it's pressure from parents that have kept the school model stuck in the dark ages. Parents want results and to get that you have to sit children down and get the information into them. Every single lesson has to have objectives and outcomes, so informal teaching or teaching outside of the classroom where data can't be taken is seen as time wasted.