Michael Gove proposes longer school day and shorter holidays

[Zaune]

The Guardian

Education secretary Michael Gove has called for longer school days and a cut in the length of holidays, which he said would improve performance and make life easier for working parents.

The reforms could allow state schools to choose to stay open until 4.30pm and introduce a shorter, four-week summer holiday for pupils from September next year, representing a profound change for parents used to tailoring their working hours to the classroom timetable.

Gove said the school system had been designed for a 19th-century agricultural economy and risked leaving British children trailing those in Asia. "It may be the case that there are one or two legislative and bureaucratic obstacles which prevent all schools moving in this direction, but I think it's consistent with the pressures of a modern society. I also think it's going to be family friendly," he said.

Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said Gove was "making policy up on the hoof," without regard for the evidence. "Teachers and pupils already spend longer hours in the classroom than most countries and also have some of the shortest summer holidays," she said.

"Independent schools in England and Wales, which often break for two weeks more during the summer and have longer holidays at other times of the year than their state counterparts, do not apparently feel the need to change and are apparently not suffering from their reduced hours."

The changes would require a rewriting of teachers' contracts, which Gove kickstarted this week by asking the independent School Teachers' Review Body to examine working hours. The current contract mandates that teachers work 195 days or 1,265 hours a year.

Gove told a conference in London, organised by the Spectator magazine, that pupils were being handicapped in comparison with their peers in other countries. "The structure of the school term and the school day was designed at a time when we had an agricultural economy," he said.

"I remember half-term in October when I was at school in Aberdeen was called the tattie holiday – the period when kids would go to the fields to pick potatoes. It was also at a time when the majority of mums stayed home. That world no longer exists and we can't afford to have an education system that was essentially set in the 19th century."

Gove gave the example of successful education systems in east Asia that demanded higher standards of their students and had longer school days and shorter holidays.

"We've noticed in Hong Kong and Singapore and other East Asian nations that expectations of mathematical knowledge or of scientific knowledge at every stage are more demanding than in this country," Gove said.

"In order to reach those levels of achievement a higher level of effort is expected on behalf of students, parents and teachers. School days are longer, school holidays are shorter. The expectation is that to succeed, hard work is at the heart of everything."

"If you look at the length of the school day in England, the length of the summer holiday … then we are fighting or actually running in this global race in a way that ensures that we start with a significant handicap."

Commenting on the speech, a Whitehall source said: "We can either start working as hard as the Chinese, or we'll all soon be working for the Chinese."

Under the current system, the school year is 190 days long. Pupils get around six weeks off in summer, two weeks at Christmas and Easter as well as three half-term breaks lasting a week each. School days usually run from around 9am to 3pm, or 3.30pm.

Some academies and free schools – which have more freedom to vary their operating hours – already keep their pupils in school for longer than state schools.

The Ark chain of academies, for example, has mandatory school hours of 8.30am-4.30pm on four days a week and holds remedial classes on Saturdays for pupils lagging in maths and English.

Other schools have varied the structure of the school year, such as the David Young Community Academy in Leeds, which has a seven-term year.

Asked if there was going to be a teachers' strike, Gove said: "Yes. There seems to be a competition between the NUT and NASUWT to compete for members, with each one trying to out-radical the other."

Gove made an offer to unions who complain about his reforms: "Many of [the teaching unions] have very passionate criticisms of the model of education that I've outlined and there's an open invitation to the unions which is: prove me wrong, set up a free school.

"If the NUT were to set up a free school, we would find them a building, we would fund it. And I would love to see an NUT or another union free school."

Turning down Gove's offer, a union spokesperson said: "The NUT is in a lot of places already. They're called schools."

At their Easter conference this year the NUT called for new limits on working hours amid concerns that school staff are facing "totally unsustainable" workloads.

Delegates backed a plan by the NUT's executive to draw up a draft contract setting out a 35-hour working week.

This would include 20 hours of "pupil contact time" - the equivalent to four hours a day in the classroom - as well as 10 hours for lesson planning, preparation and assessment, and five hours for "non-contact duties" such as staff meetings, parents' evenings and logging pupils' results.

Separately, universities minister David Willetts said he wanted to galvanise successful pupils from poorer backgrounds into applying to university – by sending them letters of encouragement from government ministers.

Posted without comment.

[El Moose Monstero]

To quote someone from the News Quiz, it's like he's got a room full of london cabbies writing his policies for him.

[Teebs]

Actually I think a shorter summer holiday is a very good idea. I've read several studies saying that the long break is quite bad for children's learning and they come back to school having forgotten quite a bit. That doesn't require longer school days though, just balancing holidays out a bit more throughout the year.

[Grumman]

"We've noticed in Hong Kong and Singapore and other East Asian nations that expectations of mathematical knowledge or of scientific knowledge at every stage are more demanding than in this country," Gove said.

"In order to reach those levels of achievement a higher level of effort is expected on behalf of students, parents and teachers. School days are longer, school holidays are shorter. The expectation is that to succeed, hard work is at the heart of everything."

And I've noticed that suicide rates in South Korea, China and Japan are two to three times higher than in the UK or US. There are valid reasons to tinker with the length or quantity of school days, but I don't think increasing the workload to emulate East Asian society is one of them.

[Ralin]

Eh, changing the length of your holidays or even school days to be closer to theirs doesn't mean you have to adopt their system whole hog. I'd say the issue with their education systems is more the focus on memorization and tests and the huge ass amount of homework they hand out.

Or from what I've heard anyway. I haven't read much past the news/online article about the education systems in those places. But I do work in the mainland Chinese public school system and I'm guessing at least some of the problems are shared.

[xerex]

all id do is rearrange the vacation days.


instead of 2 weeks for easter
7 weeks for summer
and 3 weeks for christmas


i'd make it an even 4 weeks each.

[Simon_Jester]

And I've noticed that suicide rates in South Korea, China and Japan are two to three times higher than in the UK or US. There are valid reasons to tinker with the length or quantity of school days, but I don't think increasing the workload to emulate East Asian society is one of them.

There are, essentially, two ways to make a school system work well, in my opinion.

One is to set very high standards, drill and work the students relentlessly, and (this is important) remove anyone who can't or won't keep up. If you are not concerned that your high school has expelled or forcibly transferred away 10% or 15% of its students by the time they graduate, you may well see better results from that high school. Because now the school does not have to worry about its persistent disciplinary problems. It does not have to worry about teaching kids with severe behavioral and learning disabilities in the same classrooms as the ordinary students and the magnet students.

But the students who are still in your school system by the 11th grade will do very well indeed on global standardized tests.


The other way is to have a very, very large number of teachers and administrators and more or less drown the kids in manpower. Because if you aren't kicking out the kids who persistently fail to meet your system's standards, you have to work with them individually. With the kids who have trouble learning, that means a lot of teacher work. With the kids who have raging-asshole behavior problems, that means a lot of administrative work to enforce the rules.

If there's a manpower limit, then this becomes a zero-sum game. Every hour I spend trying to accommodate little Susie who's brain isn't set up to interpret writing (but otherwise is intelligent), or trying to get in touch with the parents of little Johnny who likes to scream and shout and punch his classmates whenever they pass his desk, is an hour NOT spent planning and organizing and working to improve the overall education of the median student in the class.

Deciding not to leave those children behind means a lot of work, and we only hurt our own educational system if we don't increase the amount of manpower, and the average number of teacher-hours per student in the building, accordingly. I suspect in Britain that the teachers can't work harder, if Britain is anything like the US in this regard, because you can't induce or reasonably expect normal human beings to work 60 hour weeks all the time. So unless Gove is willing to hire more people, I don't think he's going to improve the system by imitating Asian school hours.


Now, that's my opinion right now. I'd be delighted to learn that Asian schools have a solution to the 'severe problem child takes up all the school's time and distracts everyone' issue other than 'kick him out.' Wish I knew what it was.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Eh, changing the length of your holidays or even school days to be closer to theirs doesn't mean you have to adopt their system whole hog. I'd say the issue with their education systems is more the focus on memorization and tests and the huge ass amount of homework they hand out.

Or from what I've heard anyway. I haven't read much past the news/online article about the education systems in those places. But I do work in the mainland Chinese public school system and I'm guessing at least some of the problems are shared.

There's the memorization bit, and there's also the fact that students learn quite a bit more material than most American students learn before they arrive in college.

[Simon_Jester]

Although here the standard of comparison is Britain.

[Admiral Valdemar]

I'd rather they split the holidays more evenly, then looked at making school more than a machine for making kids pass standardised tests through rote memorisation, which does fuck all to prepare you for real life unless you work as a trivia quizmaster.

[spaceviking]

I think the longer school day would not be so bad, if it was based on the idea that the student will have competed all their work for the day.

[Simon_Jester]

The one catch is that this means the teachers also spend more hours in the classroom. Since a given human being can't really work more than 8-10 hours a day, that comes out of planning time, grading time, and so on. So you need to hire more staff and set aside more planning time at school for the teachers, or you're not going to get quality education out of those extra hours.

[Minischoles]

It's no wonder Gove has every teacher ready to strike at this point, the man is in polite terms, a complete fuckwit with zero ideas of how to run his department.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

Although here the standard of comparison is Britain.

The British A' Level system has been dumbed down considerably compared to its overseas counterparts.

[Simon_Jester]

I can't generalize to British schools, but you see certain problems in the US:

-School getting de facto responsibility for socialization of children, teaching them how to behave in civilized company. This does NOT work well, school is the wrong environment to learn those behaviors for the same reason prison is the wrong place to learn not to commit crimes. In a school the kids are locked in with children who behave well, but also those who behave badly, as badly as they can without getting expelled. The trend is toward the lowest common standard of behavior and respect for education.

-Laserlike focus on test prep. Not that this means memorization as such, but the fixation on test prep means that ONLY whatever is on the test that year gets taught, that there is no time to lay intellectual groundwork for next year, because whatever happens you have to wrestle to increase this year's test scores. It also means that there's very little direct benefit to teaching the kids at low grade levels to answer questions more complex than whatever they'll face on the standardized test. But when they don't learn how to do that, they wind up paralyzed at later grades when the questions get more complex and they have no functional problem-solving skills.

-As a corollary to that, the need to get test scores up also means that teaching practical skills not tested (like being able to read a freaking analog clock) and teaching applications of what you've learned become... almost a waste of time. Never mind that, we've got a state assessment to pass! Or else!

It's great for churning out masses of people at the lowest common denominator. Not so good for turning out the scientists and engineers that American policymakers say they want from the educational system.

[Dr. Trainwreck]

The idea that reducing holiday time will reduce literacy loss is sound, people.* Granted, Gove is contractually required to combine it with TEH YELLOW PERIL and be a total fuckwit about the entire thing, but he managed his own broken clock analogy here.

*I've so far found a Wikipedia page, a 1972 study called "The Effect of Long Summer Holidays on Children Literacy" by EW Turner and another study called "The Effects of Summer Vacation on Achievement Test Scores: A Narrative and Meta-Analytic Review". Sadly, my google-fu is too weak to get the studies proper beyond abstracts ans such.

[ArmorPierce]

Is there any study that measures the performance or grasp of material between a student who studies with a test in mind vs a student who doesn't? I think that someone who studies for the test probably has more knowledge than someone who was otherwise more passive in their learning and a student studying for a test will study harder. I recall I believe it was Columbia which became a GPA non-disclosure school for their MBA program (students are not allowed to disclose their gpa to employers neither). Study time dedicated to class fell significantly.

I think studying for a test or quizzes throughout the year is a good thing. Alternative might be breaking it out into smaller quizzes rather than major mid term/final. There is no other alternative objective measure of the performance of the student. If you measured it on more subjective qualities of the teacher, you are bound to get teachers who are dicking over students because "I didn't like his face."

You can also give more credit towards homework and projects I guess but that doesn't necessarily indicate knowledge of the material. In fact it may actually take away study time from the overall material and highlight other skills such as artistic or presentation skills in the case of a powerpoint presentation.

[spaceviking]

I think studying for a test or quizzes throughout the year is a good thing. Alternative might be breaking it out into smaller quizzes rather than major mid term/final. There is no other alternative objective measure of the performance of the student. If you measured it on more subjective qualities of the teacher, you are bound to get teachers who are dicking over students because "I didn't like his face."

Correct me if I am wrong, but I believe places such as Harvard have moved away from big cumulative finals in favor of regular smaller tests. Whicj I think is probably a better way to learn.

[Simon_Jester]

The idea that reducing holiday time will reduce literacy loss is sound, people.* Granted, Gove is contractually required to combine it with TEH YELLOW PERIL and be a total fuckwit about the entire thing, but he managed his own broken clock analogy here.

I believe it. It's the longer school day that concerns me. The actual teaching part of a school day isn't limited to 6-7 hours just because superintendants like ignorance...

Is there any study that measures the performance or grasp of material between a student who studies with a test in mind vs a student who doesn't? I think that someone who studies for the test probably has more knowledge than someone who was otherwise more passive in their learning and a student studying for a test will study harder. I recall I believe it was Columbia which became a GPA non-disclosure school for their MBA program (students are not allowed to disclose their gpa to employers neither). Study time dedicated to class fell significantly.

GPA is different from standardized testing. At the high school level, standardized testing is a bear, because all the pressure for the last 15 years or so has been on creating big tough tests to make sure the high schools are performing adequately.

The problem is that the teachers don't design these tests, the state and the ETS do. And they're not part of the natural process of grading, they're a test of what the state thinks you should teach. They're there to assess whether the school has taught the curriculum, which is good in theory... but it means the school succeeds or fails based on the test score, which means they will change every single part of what they do if that's what it takes to increase the test scores. Even if that means that the students learn less, say, because they spend the whole fourth quarter reviewing for the Big Honking State Test in May.

If taking April to review the stuff you taught in September through November nets you a bigger increase on your end-of-year test scores, instead of, y'know, actually teaching new content... that's what your school will do.

That's "high stakes testing" in a nutshell.

[DieselJester]

I think that part of the problem within the Educational System (at least here in the United States) is that we're not paying teachers nearly enough of what they're worth nor are we investing enough into Educational Programs themselves for our youth.

Personally, I'm all for a proposal that started getting kicked around when I was in High School and that's doing 3 Months on, 1 Month off for a year-round school schedule. It'd probably increase retention as was mentioned earlier.

[TheHammer]

The one catch is that this means the teachers also spend more hours in the classroom. Since a given human being can't really work more than 8-10 hours a day, that comes out of planning time, grading time, and so on. So you need to hire more staff and set aside more planning time at school for the teachers, or you're not going to get quality education out of those extra hours.

A compromise would be to include a mandatory "study hall" type period. This would allow teachers supervising the study hall a "prep" period for planning/grading, would extend the day, and ostensibly give students time to do homework, study, etc. While not all of students would take advantage of this, some certainly would get more homework done that otherwise wouldn't be with the distraction of home, friends, tv etc.

[Simon_Jester]

The one catch is that this means the teachers also spend more hours in the classroom. Since a given human being can't really work more than 8-10 hours a day, that comes out of planning time, grading time, and so on. So you need to hire more staff and set aside more planning time at school for the teachers, or you're not going to get quality education out of those extra hours.

A compromise would be to include a mandatory "study hall" type period. This would allow teachers supervising the study hall a "prep" period for planning/grading, would extend the day, and ostensibly give students time to do homework, study, etc. While not all of students would take advantage of this, some certainly would get more homework done that otherwise wouldn't be with the distraction of home, friends, tv etc.

Now, how do you keep the study hall itself from being the distraction?

That requires either the right kind of student body (who will work without being told or monitored), or the active monitoring and surveillance of the teacher (in which case the teacher can't very well be working at the same time).

I think that part of the problem within the Educational System (at least here in the United States) is that we're not paying teachers nearly enough of what they're worth nor are we investing enough into Educational Programs themselves for our youth.

Why are you capitalizing Random Nouns?

Anyway, if I had to choose between paying the teachers half again as much money, and just hiring half again as many of them, I'd choose the latter- and I'm already living on that salary. The problem isn't just spending enough money to recruit high-powered talent. It's that you physically need X people watching the special ed students, you need Y people sweeping the halls and keeping people going to class, you need Z teachers covering remedial math...

Basically, by "leaving no child behind," we're keeping in the building the most labor-intensive and challenging students, who require the most input in manpower and effort to teach, and who often learn the least from he experience. As a result, we end up either hugely overworking the teachers, or hugely increasing the number of teachers so there are enough warm bodies to go around.

Since you don't get twice as much talent for twice the salary normally, we need more staff more than we need higher pay.

Personally, I'm all for a proposal that started getting kicked around when I was in High School and that's doing 3 Months on, 1 Month off for a year-round school schedule. It'd probably increase retention as was mentioned earlier.

Worth a shot.

[TheHammer]

The one catch is that this means the teachers also spend more hours in the classroom. Since a given human being can't really work more than 8-10 hours a day, that comes out of planning time, grading time, and so on. So you need to hire more staff and set aside more planning time at school for the teachers, or you're not going to get quality education out of those extra hours.

A compromise would be to include a mandatory "study hall" type period. This would allow teachers supervising the study hall a "prep" period for planning/grading, would extend the day, and ostensibly give students time to do homework, study, etc. While not all of students would take advantage of this, some certainly would get more homework done that otherwise wouldn't be with the distraction of home, friends, tv etc.

Now, how do you keep the study hall itself from being the distraction?

That requires either the right kind of student body (who will work without being told or monitored), or the active monitoring and surveillance of the teacher (in which case the teacher can't very well be working at the same time).

A teacher can work in an environment such as this without having to be too distracted. Younger students would be easier to control than older ones, and you can cut down on student to student fraternization during study halls via appropriate discipline.

Obviously, this won't guarantee students won't be goofing off even if they are behaving themselves, but then those students are likely to goof off in whatever class they find themselves in. What it will do is give the rest of the students, who have at least some sense of responsibility but may find it difficult in their home lives to concentrate on homework or studies, an opportunity to actually be more productive in their coursework. It would be an incentive for them to be able to get school work done at school rather than having to use personal time to do it.

[DarkArk]

I think that part of the problem within the Educational System (at least here in the United States) is that we're not paying teachers nearly enough of what they're worth nor are we investing enough into Educational Programs themselves for our youth.

It's not pay that we need, it's social standing. Finland and Singapore (the two educational systems people love to put up as the best in the world), don't pay their teachers significantly differently from the US. However, what they do do is hold teaching as a worthwhile profession for skilled people to go into. Within their society teachers are help up with respect, and there are stringent entry requirements to become one. Contrast that with many views in the United States, where teaching is where people with no talent go. It then becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in many cases.

[Starglider]

I think that part of the problem within the Educational System (at least here in the United States) is that we're not paying teachers nearly enough of what they're worth

Median US full-time employee income is approx $28K. Median income for all US high-school teachers is approx $52K. Exactly how many times more than an average worker do you think a teacher is 'worth' ? Increasing the salary of all high-school teachers uniformly would cost approx $6B per $1K; pay increases for elementary teachers would cost a similar amount, but they earn less than half as much as high-school teachers. How are you going to raise those funds and what specific improvements will that expenditure buy?