Under new government policy, schools across the country will be instructed to provide at least 32.5 hours of teaching per week. This new minimum requirement will be detailed in the Schools White Paper set to be published on Monday 4 April alongside other changes that constitute part of Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s ‘levelling up’ plans.
The majority of primary and secondary schools in the UK already provide this quantity of teaching. Yet government ministers maintain that there are ‘discrepancies’ here which they aim to get rid of by 2023. This new plan is the equivalent of a Monday-Friday 8:45am-3:15pm school day. Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi, who confirmed the plan on Sunday 27 March, pointed out that if a child misses out on 20 minutes of teaching a day, they will in total miss out on around two whole weeks of teaching over a year.
Zahawi told Sky News’ Sophy Ridge on Sunday show; ‘The average school day is 32-and-a-half hours. Some schools, thousands of schools, are 30 minutes lower than that. So we want schools to be, sort of, 9am to 3.30pm.
‘I’d like them all to do it by the end of this year, but I know some will have logistical problems. Which is why we’ve said by next year.’
‘Wondering where the ambition for children’s futures is’
According to the Independent, the Department for Education maintains that ‘the change aimed to build on the government’s levelling-up mission for schools, which aims for 90 per cent of pupils leaving primary school to have reached expected standards in numeracy and literacy,’ yet criticism from the Labour party suggests that the government is not doing enough.
Shadow Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson stated that this proposed enforced school day essentially told most schools to ‘carry on as normal.’
Phillipson said that following the past two years of ‘pandemic chaos’, this idea could leave students, schools, and parents ‘wondering where the ambition for children’s futures is’, pointing out that ‘for almost eight in 10 schools, the education secretary’s big idea is to carry on as normal.
‘Hundreds of thousands of primary children live in an area with no ‘good’ schools, the gap in learning between the most and least well-off pupils has widened during Covid, four in ten young people leave education without the skills they need and young people are experiencing a mental health crisis. Yet the government has no answers.’
Furthermore, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, Geoff Barton, stated; ‘We are unconvinced by the benefits of introducing a minimum expectation on the length of the school week of 32.5 hours.
‘It may be the case in some rural schools that start and finish times are affected by transport arrangements. Adding time on to the school week may sound straightforward, but there are many issues which need to be considered in individual schools, and we would encourage the government not to rush any changes.’