Should Michael Gove lengthen the school day? The question itself is wrong, of course, as what he wants to do is give schools the opportunity to change hours as they wish, rather than telling them what do to. This isn’t a case of ‘here is your freedom, and this is how you must use it’, but a change in the contract so that schools can do what they want. Currently, the contract for teachers in maintained schools states that they should work no more than 195 days or 1265 hours a year. The Education department has asked the independent School Teachers’ Review Body to look again at this contract so that schools are not forced to keep 195 days as a maximum.
Gove and colleagues are keen to push this idea as being a key part of the ‘global race’ that the Conservatives like to mention when they are discussing radical reforms and difficult decisions. The Education Secretary referred to the race in his speech to the Spectator education conference yesterday. And comparisons between the educational prowess of Britons and east Asian countries formed a key part of ‘After the Coalition’, a book written by a group of MPs including Gove’s former adviser Chris Skidmore and Liz Truss, who is now a minister in Gove’s department. Now one Whitehall source tells me:
‘We can either start working as hard as the Chinese, or we’ll all soon be working for the Chinese.’
There is one interesting question for the Labour party, though. In the US, the Democrats are actively standing up to their unions on exactly the same proposals. In Chicago, city mayor Rahm Emanuel is trying to lengthen the school day from an average of five hours 45 minutes to seven hours. In this country, the two largest unions are threatening to strike over performance-related pay, which will benefit many of their talented and hard-working members. Lengthening the school day will upset more teachers than performance-related pay. Stephen Twigg has previously supported the idea of a longer school day, and he continues to support the idea of freedoms for schools on this, but is he really prepared to stand up to the teaching unions?
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