State secondary schools in England & Wales - do they have the same start and end time each day?

[Anna8888]

Do your children from age 11 have to be at school at the same time every day and do they end their school day at the same time every day? And do all children in the school have the same start/end time?

Asking because here in France the start and end time are different every day, depending on the child's individual timetable. Which makes childcare at the beginning and end of the day horrendously complicated.

And, if the timetable is not set in stone, when do know what it will be - on the first day of term in September, or before?

Every school I have known has had regular hours.
I work freelance so I work the hours that suit me / the children. When the kids were younger I chose schools with after-school clubs, which they loved.

Regular school hours combined with part-time, flexible working is probably the easiest combination to manage for after-school care. Lucky (or perhaps very foresightful) you .

Irregular school hours combined with long, fixed working hours is another (not always unavoidable) story

I'd like to say that it was foresight but it was mostly luck ... although you make your own luck, she says, trying to retrieve some credibility ...

Have you spotted this thread?

Apart from the Wed, I think the school accepts that your DSS might well stay on after the official end of his classes and work in the CDI or elsewhere until 5:30pm or the latest class time. That's what often happens in places (not Neuilly, maybe) where pupils take the school bus home, so schools are usually geared to cater for it. There isn't necessarily the expectation that you would provide childcare for those hours, teachers might think he could do his homework at school until he went home.
I think that in the UK, because the school day is shorter and follows a fixed schedule, kids don't have so many free periods as French pupils do. Though according to age, siblings in the same school might not finish classes at the same time. But my memories of UK schooling are now quite old...!

Sorry, just noticed that you're only interested in England & Wales.
Ignore my remarks about UK schooling, they're based on Scotland.
But as far as the French system goes I'm still sure that your DSS's school doesn't necessarily expect him to leave the premises after the end of his last class of the day.

There are no school buses in these parts - all children live within walking distance of their assigned state school.

Although children can technically stay at school longer than their timetabled hours, that makes for a very long school day - 8 am to 17.30 pm (except half day Wednesdays) (this is definitely too long a day for my second DSS who gets severely overtired in primary school) and still doesn't account for the two hours or so in the evening until parents get home. So it isn't easy to sort...

All schools here, primary or secondary have the same hours every day. My 3 finish at 3.05 and 3.10 and 3.15 and before I became self employed about a year ago, I used to use either a child minder or after school club for them. I have to say after age 13, as I was home by 4pm anyway, my eldest was home alone for that 30ish minutes.

Does your school not run a club for after hours?