This article was originally published on 16 June 2023

When the government’s Schools White Paper was unveiled in 2022, one of the most headline-grabbing announcements was the requirement for all schools to adhere to a minimum 32.5-hour week. 

The move, which has been delayed until September 2024, was billed as ensuring consistency of educational delivery across schools, in part to help offset the impact of the pandemic on children’s education.  

Despite the potential upheaval for schools, the government said it believed most schools already adhered to this 32.5-hour minimum and so the change would only affect a small number of settings.     

However, school leaders’ unions and sector bodies such as the Confederation of School Trusts (CST) have called for urgent clarity on the policy - not least because the further guidance promised has not materialised.

So far, there has been no sign of this guidance or a change of policy from the Department for Education.

The 32.5-hour minimum school week

Given this situation, many school leaders have simply got on with the work required to align themselves with this new requirement. One such leader is Matthew Jessop, headteacher at Crosthwaite CE Primary School in Cumbria.

He tells Tes that he found the new requirement “simple and straightforward to implement”. It was achieved by adding an extra 15 minutes to the school day in afternoon lesson time so that everyone finishes at 3.30pm rather than 3.15pm.

Obviously, adding 15 minutes on to the end of the day could have sparked a negative reaction from parents because of the impact on pick-up times, childminding requirements and work patterns. However, Jessop says that with the school conducting a consultation, parents got clear insight into the upcoming changes and there were no issues raised.   

“There has been no complaint. Parents don’t mind because it’s a fairly small change [and] everyone adapted to it well,” he adds. 

Jessop admits that the change has brought “additional cost to run a longer school day”, mostly due to the longer supervision time for supporting staff - although he puts this cost in the four-figures region, meaning it is only “a small increase, compared with other costs we are tussling with”.

Such a (relatively) small cost to implement these changes may well be reassuring, especially as the government made it clear it would not provide any additional funding to schools to meet this new requirement.

Making use of the extra time

While Jessop’s school has added the extra time on to the afternoon lessons, Nigel Ford, headteacher at Trinity High School and Sixth Form Centre in Worcestershire, explains that it has used the 10 minutes being added to its school day to add five minutes’ extra reading time in the morning and five minutes to the first break. 

“My initial idea was to add 10 minutes of reading time in the morning because reading was our weaker area. But we quickly saw students struggling to go to the canteen because we have got short breaks,” Ford says. 

The final decision was arrived at by running “rounds and rounds of consultations and reviews” to get the voices of the stakeholders, including students, teachers, parents and supporting staff. This ensured that the way those extra minutes were allocated was seen as being the best for everyone.

Ford says that this process took time but he believes it was worth it.

“If we implemented it the way I wanted it, it wouldn’t have the same results. I actually listened to the voices of stakeholders. That’s the most powerful part. Because of that, people have bought into it,” he says. 

Christopher Dale, headteacher at St Nicholas CE Primary Academy in Kent, agrees that consultation with parents is vital to get the right outcomes.

“We started our consultation last April and not only did we consult parents but also local secondary schools, children’s centres and nurseries, as they could have family members here or are interested in joining our establishment,” he explains. 

As the school was starting at 8.30am and finishing at 3pm, the plan was to add 15 minutes to either the morning or the afternoon. The feedback was clear: “For parents, over 60 per cent of them wanted to finish 15 minutes later, [as] it’s better for them to keep the same start time due to their own work commitments.”

‘Everybody is happy’

The next part of the process was ensuring that this could work for the local bus company in terms of collection times. Here, Dale admits that his school got “lucky”. 

“Our bus provider could only do a later collection time in the afternoon but not an earlier pick-up time in the morning. If the interest on both sides collided, we would have faced real challenges,” he says.

After the decision to make the day longer was agreed, the next question was where to incorporate the extra time. This was complicated by the fact that time was being used differently across phases. Key stage 1 pupils were getting an hour of break while KS2 pupils were getting 45 minutes.

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Now KS2 pupils receive five minutes’ extra breaktime with the remaining 10 extra minutes going into teaching, while KS1 pupils benefit from 15 minutes more teaching time per day - no doubt exactly the sort of thing the government had hoped to achieve.

Dale says this has made life easier for staff, too. “Historically, there was a 15-minute breaktime disparity between key stage 1 and key stage 2 pupils, which had always created tension among teachers supervising those periods due to how we operated,” he explains. 

“Now that we have standardised the breaktime, everyone is more satisfied. Although some pupils and teachers have lost a few minutes of breaktime, everyone is happy because it’s equitable across the whole school. It releases the tension from the disparity.” 

Running those extra 15 minutes has led to additional costs for the school, which is “one of the downsides” of a longer day, Dale says. The school has had to spend a few thousand pounds more on support staff. 

Furthermore, Dale admits that adding teaching time to the school day did require what he diplomatically terms “mediation” with staff about how adding the extra time would affect their workloads. But he says that with extensive communication and engagement, teachers have “bought into” the change. 

Engaging all staff

Richard Paez, headteacher at Selling CE Primary School in Kent, agrees that engaging with staff on changes is perhaps the biggest element of adhering to the new requirement. He notes, for example, that teaching assistant contracts had to be looked at again because of the requirement for more supervision time.

Previously, the school was “still using staggered hours from Covid-19”. Now the school has standardised its day with a start at 8.40am and a finish at 3.15pm, with a total of 32.9 hours per week. 

“Parents are pleased that children are now coming in and leaving at the same time to secure quality teaching hours at the school,” says Paez.

He, too, admits that the financial impact was a major consideration. “When you increase the school day, it impacts the contract hours of support staff, like TAs. The school had to consider having some TAs finish before the school day,” he says.

‘Now that we have standardised the breaktime, everyone is more satisfied’

While some schools have been reorganising their week on their own, others have been able to call on support from their trust.

Carol Dewhurst, CEO of Bradford Diocesan Academies Trust, a multi-academy trust comprising 19 schools, says that while it has given each school the freedom to choose “the most beneficial approach within their context”, support has been on hand where required. 

“The MAT provides guidance on policy and staffing as required. Our HR providers are also available for support,” she says. 

“In relation to timetabling, the executive team has worked with the headteachers to ensure the timetabling was constructed to accommodate these changes to support the educational provision appropriately,” she says.  

“[Schools] have been supported with guidance on potential solutions, and how to communicate the changes we decided.” 

These changes have not been too substantial, as most schools in the trust already adhered to the 32.5-hour rule. Where work has been required, it has meant “small changes in logistics”. But, with support from the trust, it has not been “a huge issue to overcome through proactive planning and communication”, says Dewhurst.

For example, schools that rely on public transport did consultations regarding the bus service timetables, while schools that rely on service buses amended the timings with providers.

Overall, Dewhurst’s advice for any other school or trust when it comes to transport issues relating to changing the school week is to plan ahead. “As we planned this sufficiently in advance, we have overcome this concern on the rare occasion it occurred,” she says.

‘It brings contracts and hours to the fore at a time when staff feel underpaid and undervalued’

Jo Evans, CEO at St Christopher’s Multi-Academy Trust, agrees that being aware of the numerous potential impacts from changing the week has been vital, outlining numerous issues that have come to light, even though most of its 19 schools were already compliant. 

“It’s affected PPA [planning, preparation and assessment] in some schools, [and it] brings contracts and hours to the fore at a time when staff are nervous about their roles and as TAs and teachers feel underpaid and undervalued,” she says. 

The MAT has called on support from its school improvement leads and HR team to assist in school matters during these changes - but Evans admits it has not been easy. 

“There are increased costs and also time is taken to do this work at a time when we are struggling with capacity due to financial pressures and challenges in recruiting and retaining staff,” she says. 

The impact on behaviour

The challenges involved in lengthening the school day are not limited to staff and finances either: behaviour is also an issue. 

Kulvarn Atwal, headteacher at Highlands Primary School and Uphall Primary School, both in Essex, says that while making changes to adhere to the 32.5-hour rule was fine in one school, in the other things were far more complicated. 

This was because the most feasible option was to extend the lunch break but this risked creating new problems. “A sizeable portion of behavioural incidents happened within longer breaks because students were getting bored,” says Atwal, noting that in the past breaks had been reduced to tackle this problem. 

Given this sort of situation, he questions the logic of the 32.5-hour requirement - especially as he believes that most schools will also simply extend the lunch break rather than “increasing teaching time”. 

This was a point made by Laura McInerney in a piece for Tes last year, in which she said it seemed likely that most schools would simply push for longer lunchtimes to adhere to the new requirement - and only a tiny minority of schools surveyed recently expected to extend lessons times to hit the target. 

However, while longer lunch breaks might be the case for some, for other schools, as we have seen above, the 32.5-hour rule has led to more teaching and reading time, suggesting that the policy could have a positive impact in some instances.

Given this, it seems surprising that the Department for Education has been so reluctant to issue more clarification on the policy or the guidance that it promised would arrive almost a year ago. 

Like they always do, schools have simply rolled up their sleeves and got on with it to ensure that they make the best of the new requirement.

As Ford explains: “Schools have to be very careful on how to put those extra minutes into good use.” 

Kimberley Cheung is a freelance journalist