Pupils lost around a third of their face-to-face teaching during the Covid lockdowns. Downing Street has promised an extra £3 billion of catch-up funding, on top of around £100 billion spent on education in a normal year. Fixing a lack of teaching should involve doing a bit more of it — but when asked if he would extend the school day, Rishi Sunak said longer hours wouldn’t provide ‘value for money’. It’s one of few areas where, in tomorrow’s Budget, the spending taps will be turned off.
But why, as the Children’s Commissioner recently noted, are British state schools routinely closing their gates at 2.30 p.m.? The length of the school day is now shorter than it was 50 years ago. More teaching tends to mean better exam results — hence why many private schools offer longer hours and even Saturday school — not to mention making the school run easier for working parents. It doesn’t just have to be lessons either: an extended day would involve sport, clubs, arts and drama — all areas that are disproportionately taken up by children from more affluent backgrounds.
Before boosting the extra-curricular provision, however, government urgently needs to focus on proper teaching of the core subjects — reading, writing and arithmetic, to use the unfashionable Victorian creed. According to the OECD, the UK lags far behind Asian countries like China, South Korea and Japan when it comes to these essential skills, as well as behind many of our European neighbours including Estonia, Switzerland and Bulgaria. Somewhere between 15 and 20 per cent of pupils leave school ‘functionally illiterate’.
The government should change the structure not just of the school day but the school year.
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