Are Five-Term Years and Longer School Days the Best Way for Pupils to Catch up on Missed Education?
By Naomi Norden
One of the greatest political challenges the Government faces in directing the route out of lockdown is ensuring that no child across the UK is left disadvantaged by missed in-person teaching. Education Secretary Gavin Williamson’s desire for “transformative” change in the education system to mitigate the effects of disrupted education is understandable. After all, COVID has arguably worsened issues in the education system which previously existed – and Williamson has likely realised that a bold plan is needed for the future in order for his position, already hanging by a thread, to remain tenable. Some potential plans being considered include lengthening the school day, shortening summer holidays and, most radically, changing the current three-term school year to a five-term one.
The consensus around the practicality, feasibility and possible outcomes of these plans are varied. Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman has indicated on Sky News that previous trials of these measures have not been a success, asserting that she is more concerned that “we go with the grain of what parents will embrace”. Nevertheless, one of the largest hurdles is ensuring that unions, often critical of the current Government when it comes to education policy, are on board. The i newspaper, however, reports that the Association of School and College Leaders, which represents over 21,000 headteachers, welcomes a review into the structure of the school year, while the National Education Union appears cautiously open to a potential revamp. Indeed, the underlying message to the response from these organisations and ones similar to them is that any revised school year plans cannot be rushed and must be backed by evidence – but is the evidence consistent, and is now really the right time to making such radical changes which could backfire, harming the already-harmed education of children with it?
Studies suggests that the case for longer school days is not so clear cut. Research by Tes cites the extension of the school day for the lowest performing primary schools in Florida in 2012, which entailed an extra hour of literacy teaching per day. While researchers found that students who received this extra learning time ended up performing better than other schools in reading, the impact was uneven – students with “basic” reading skills rather than the “lowest” reading skills improved the most, which Tes argues could increase the attainment gap between these groups further. Moreover, the report on this experiment notes that, overall, it is difficult to evaluate the correlation between longer school days and academic achievement due to differences in student characteristics and resources between the schools which implement the policy.
Regarding the shorter holidays, going hand-in-hand with the five-term school year, the consensus is again mixed. On the plus side, shorter breaks mean less time wasted reviewing content which may have been forgotten over the current longer breaks, and therefore more productive use of teaching time. Furthermore, the leader of the aforementioned Association of School and College Leaders, Julie McCulloch, has indicated that there is indeed evidence to suggest that children from more disadvantaged backgrounds could benefit from a more even spread of holidays, while a professor of social mobility at the University of Exeter is reported to have proposed this to the Government last April. Another advantage could be for parents too, who would no longer need to find ways to occupy their children for six long weeks every summer – which can also involve haemorrhaging money on childcare in the process. However, several unions have dismissed Williamson’s proposals as a mere “distraction”, asserting that a better approach would be to allow teachers more time to assess the full impact of Covid on pupils before hastily lunging into radical reform.
While academic achievement is rightly one of the main considerations when it comes to pupils’ recovery, these measures fail to consider pastoral care and wellbeing – nor do they account for the quality of teaching throughout this extra teaching time. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) notes that these types of proposals usually account for core teaching time, not extra-curricular activities, and that any extension of teaching time must be used effectively. Given the critical importance of rebuilding the mental health and social development of children – considerably worsened by the pandemic – it may be more suitable to enhance the provision of activities such as sport or non-academic clubs. The EEF actually suggests that these programmes are more likely, through providing stimulating environments for the development of social skills, to have a greater impact on attainment than an increase of academic teaching time.
All in all, these plans have not been met with complete contempt – rare for Gavin Williamson’s tenure as Education Secretary – but they are also, at this stage, very vague. Indeed, the UK’s three-term year has been set in stone for decades, so it is not unreasonable to propose an overhaul. But to discern whether Williamson’s proposals have potential to accelerate student catch-up after the pandemic would require more detail into what exactly they entail for teacher workload and what aspects of school life are emphasised. The current evidence does not disagree with Williamson, but it is nowhere near comprehensive enough to support him either – and given his self-confessed desire for “evidence-based” plans, some more time is needed to determine the best course of action.