You can’t change the school timetable. And you certainly can’t reduce the time kids are in school. You can’t suddenly let thousands of children and teenagers loose in the middle of the day, or let them suddenly have a day off school without huge disruption to parents’ working weeks. Who would look after them? The economy would struggle to take the strain as parents were forced off work. The pupils would slip out of routines. It would be chaos. 

Despite the huge societal change of the pandemic, this is still the common response to any suggestions of ripping up conventional education. While the idea of children being in school for more time got some traction, any suggestion of tweaking the timetable to put kids out of school at unconventional times has always been met with horror. The barriers to less time are too complex and too large to make it happen, according to many.

However, that appears not to be true. Because despite the protestations to the contrary, schools around the world are shifting the times children are in school. And what happens next will be instructive as to how far such changes catch on.

Kausor Amin-Ali is the head of secondary at GEMS Founders School Al Mizhar in Dubai - which caters for children from the age of 3 upwards and is situated around seven miles from Dubai International Airport - and from 1 January the nation shifted to a 4.5-day working week, which means that school finishes at noon on a Friday.

Amin-Ali says pick-up on a Friday is now “a sight to witness”, with nearly 1,000 cars and 44 buses all present in the school car park at the same time to collect students.

“About 60 per cent of our students are Muslim, many of whom attend Friday prayers at the mosque, so it can be a hurried departure,” he explains.

Usually, the school has a staggered finish with the youngest children - who make up around 15 per cent of the roll - leaving earlier. But the new Friday schedule means that there is a “hard finish” at midday for staff, so all students finish at 11.30am.

The obvious advantage of the change is a longer weekend for students, says Amin-Ali. They are, he adds, a lot happier to have fewer hours in school. But making the move has been a challenge for school leaders and teaching staff in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) - not least because of the short notice they had to introduce it.

There had been rumours the government was going to move to a 4.5-day week but official confirmation did not come until Tuesday 7 December, when a tweet went out from the UAE government’s media office. From January, the country was going to “transition to a four-and-a-half-day working week, with a Friday afternoon, Saturday and Sunday forming the new weekend”. Previously - as is the case in many Muslim countries - the weekend consisted of Friday and Saturday, with the working week running from Sunday to Thursday.

Then, a day later on the afternoon of 8 December, it was confirmed that the change applied to all private schools, which were expected to start the week on Monday and end the week no later than noon on Fridays.

For Ian Thurston, principal of Dubai International Academy, that meant there was only one day of term time to respond - Thursday 9 December - before the holidays got underway.

His first move was to tell parents that school would start back on Monday 3 January, not Sunday 2 January as previously planned. Then it was a case of coming up with new timetables that took account of the change - a process that usually takes months was carried out in the first couple of weeks of the Christmas break, he says.

Overburdened and stressed out

Even with the huge disruption caused by Covid - with schools being forced to regularly pivot at short notice - it is hard to conceive of such a seismic change being put in place in such a short space of time in the UK.

But for a long time, there have been calls to cut the working week to ease the pressure on overburdened and stressed-out school staff. Most recently a report by the thinktank Autonomy, published in January, called for a four-day week to be “seriously explored” after it carried out a survey that revealed two-thirds of teachers were at breaking point because of workload.

The report also found that shortening the week for no loss in pay was “an overwhelmingly popular idea, supported by 74 per cent of the profession” - and that “schools across the UK could move to a shorter working week with few legal barriers”.

It highlighted a London school - Forest Gate Community School - that had already successfully introduced a 4.5-day week.

Simon Elliott, CEO of Community Schools Trust, which runs Forest Gate Community School, says the school made the change in September 2018 in the wake of some disturbing reports about the pressure teachers were under and the impact it was having on their wellbeing. The earlier finish was made possible by removing a 50-minute pastoral period and adding another 50-minute lesson to a Tuesday.

In another part of the UK, many schools have an even longer history of a 4.5-day week: it has been a reality in swathes of Scotland for decades.

Tes research has found that half of Scottish local authorities (16 out of 32) have at least one school that closes at lunchtime on a Friday. In some council areas, such as Perth and Kinross, it is just one secondary that closes early - but in others, every primary and secondary school finishes at lunchtime.

In the four council areas that made up the old Lothian Regional Council - Edinburgh, Midlothian, East Lothian and West Lothian, which were carved out of it in the mid 1990s - pupils have had a half-day off since the late 1980s, when the so-called asymmetric week was introduced to allow dedicated professional development time for staff one afternoon a week.

While having Friday afternoons off is now fairly common in Scotland, the change has been made possible not because of a shortening of the working week, but because of a rejigging of the school week, with the Friday lunchtime finish offset with some longer days Monday to Thursday.

David Dempster, headteacher of Boroughmuir High in Edinburgh, where students finish school at 12.50pm on a Friday, remembers the change coming in.

“It allowed schools to have staff collaborate after a short working day rather than a twilight session, when most have lost the will to do anything other than to go home.”

Today, he says, the staff in his school are free to go home most Friday afternoons - barring roughly one Friday afternoon a month when teachers are expected to stay on to take part in professional development, either as a whole school or with their faculty colleagues. On the afternoon of Friday 11 March, for example, Boroughmuir staff will be taking part in training around the rollout of new iPads to students.

“Staff can leave to go home most Fridays. And that is a good thing. It appears to shorten the working week, which it actually doesn’t, of course - it’s still 1,650 minutes [27.5 hours - the standard weekly time in class for Scottish secondary students] - but it does extend the weekend, which is always good for your wellbeing.”

Not all teachers go home on a Friday afternoon, says Dempster. Many choose to use the time to collaborate, catch up or tidy, but now it is seen as “an essential slot just to allow teachers to keep on top of things”.

North of Edinburgh city centre, Blair Minchin teaches at Victoria Primary. He takes the school football team on Friday afternoons, but when out of season he uses his Friday afternoons for CPD.

“Two years ago I did an ‘inspiring teacher leadership’ course for two hours every Friday and this year I’m doing the middle-leadership course. But I’m free to use that time how I like - colleagues sometimes head home early, some stay and plan until 4pm-ish and others run clubs.”

The shift to longer days early in the week to facilitate a longer weekend is how some schools in the UAE have approached the working-week changes. Brighton College in Al Ain has added half an hour on to the other four days of the week to make up for the half-day Friday, says Philip Mathe, the school’s director of co-curricular programmes.

He says doing so avoided significant loss of learning time and, in turn, tough conversations with parents about fees - pointing out that for fee-paying schools it could be difficult to justify charging the same if provision is being cut by a tenth.

In Dubai, Thurston considered lengthening the school day Monday to Thursday but decided that went against the spirit of what the government was trying to achieve.

“The government is doing this for wellbeing so we were trying to balance that and were thinking it could be quite contradictory to start adding hours to the other four days,” he says.

His school’s solution, therefore, was to claw back some of the time being lost by no longer having a lunch hour on a Friday, given that students would be away by midday. They also cut back a 30-minute morning registration period to five minutes, and shortened lessons on a Friday from around an hour to 40 minutes. With those changes, the noon finish on a Friday has resulted in a reduction of an hour or two in teaching time per week “tops”, Thurston says.

“For those subjects taught on a Friday, the pupils end up with 20 minutes less time in front of the teacher than they had before,” he explains. “When you look at it like that, that’s probably not going to have a massive impact.”

As for GEMS Founders School Al Mizhar, it has moved from eight single periods on a Monday to Thursday to four doubles to reduce the amount of time lost as students move between classes.

“This, we have worked out, saves the time lost by the 2.5 hours earlier finish,” says Amin-Ali.

It might seem like a lot of upheaval to end the week just a couple of hours earlier - and there is likely more change to come given that many international schools say what has been put in place is now being reviewed, with further change likely at the start of the new school year in September. After a few weeks of the new routine, however, staff seem positive.

‘Great’ for teacher wellbeing 

Mathe says the change appears to be having no detrimental effect on students and, from a personal point of view, having a Friday afternoon off is “lovely”.

“The weekend felt so much longer as a result even though it’s only a couple of hours,” he says. “From a wellbeing perspective for teachers, it’s great.”

Thurston also believes the new routine at Dubai International Academy is going to have a significant impact.

“As an educator, I don’t feel kids are having a really bad deal out of this,” he says. “As a school, we are still able to provide the same quality of education. Realistically, we used to finish at 2.40pm and now we are finishing at midday, so I still think we are providing high-quality education, but hopefully, it will give people a bit more time to relax and choose how they want to spend their time.”

Thurston says he does not leave school at midday - but he does now get home mid-afternoon on a Friday, as opposed to at 5pm or 6pm. Recently, that made a family trip to the beach after work possible - not something he would have had the time for before.

In Forest Gate Community School, which has been doing this for longer, headteacher Thahmina Begum does not doubt the positive impact it is having on teacher wellbeing.

However, she and Elliott are clear that they do not want to create a false impression: the staff at Forest Gate work exceptionally hard.

The school - which has a roll of 1,300 students - serves the London borough of Newham, where there are high levels of deprivation. Begum describes the school as “an oasis of really high standards, excellent teaching practice and safety” for its students.

“We are a really high-performing school and there are a lot of pressures associated with that and staff worked incredibly hard - way more hours than they probably should - to get the best results for our kids and there’s a real social justice drive in the school.”

Changing the pattern of the working week was about doing something meaningful for staff health and wellbeing, adds Begum, as opposed to tinkering around the edges.

“I’ve read about schools doing wellbeing twilights and directed-time yoga, and you think, ‘what is that doing?’” says Begum. “So I think if on a structural level you have the power to do something that is actually meaningful - and it makes a genuine difference to wellbeing, as well as safeguarding the outcomes for students - if we are in a position to do that we definitely, definitely should.”

But how did parents react? Undoubtedly, one of the key advantages of the way the move to a 4.5-day week has been handled in the UAE is that - because the change has come from the government - many parents now have the same working pattern as their children, which makes childcare less of a concern. In Scotland, too, the rise of more flexible working patterns has helped parents cope with the need to pick up children early on a Friday.

However, Eileen Prior, executive director of Scottish parents’ organisation Connect, says there was a very mixed response from parents to the introduction in 2009 of a Friday lunchtime finish for schools in the Scottish Borders Council area, many of whose schools are small and rural. Now, however, it is “just the way it is and people have accepted it”.

She adds: “People have worked around it but I think for younger children there is a real issue about sufficient childcare and support for families - particularly in more rural areas - to deal with that kind of scenario. I know in some Borders towns, like Peebles, they now have after-school care that they probably didn’t before but that’s paid for - it’s not free.”

When Forest Gate first moved to the half-day Friday, staff had spreadsheets full of activities planned, from bridge club to karate club - but just a handful of students turned up. The school and the grounds remain open to students on a Friday afternoon and about 70 to 80 stay on in the school building - using the school computers, for instance - and another 30 or 40 play in the grounds, making use of facilities such as artificial grass pitches.

Too good to be true 

However, many more just go home and spend the time with their friends, say both Elliott and Begum - and the staff at Forest Gate initially thought the change was too good to be true.

“I remember that first-ever half-day Friday, I kept seeing staff on site so I had to literally instruct people to go home,” says Begum.

Now, some staff use that extra bit of time to do things they do not usually get a chance to do, such as picking up their own children from school. One of the school’s assistant headteachers calls his Friday afternoons off his “daddy and daughter day”.

Others use the school gym, attend mosque or head to the local pub. Some teachers do use the time for preparation - but spending their Friday afternoons doing that is their choice, and that is key.

It is a strange thing - wherever a lunchtime finish on a Friday has been introduced, be it London, Edinburgh or Dubai - that it has meant extending the weekend by just a few hours.

But for those who have experienced it, whether for years or just a few weeks, the consensus is those few hours make a big difference to quality of life. 

At Forest Gate, Begum says half-days were typically associated with the end of term - but now every Friday has that upbeat, end-of-term feeling.

Elliott, however, sounds a note of caution: in the wake of the Autonomy report and the press coverage the school received for its 4.5-day week, he says he was contacted by the Department for Education to check Forest Gate was delivering the 190 days a year of education it is obliged to by law.

You can see why any perceived reduction in class time might jar. In response to the pandemic, there was talk - especially in England - of extending the school day. Those plans were eventually abandoned - a move that led to the resignation of the education recovery commissioner Sir Kevan Collins - but in November, England’s education secretary Nadhim Zahawi made it clear he would like to see all schools move towards being open for six and half hours a day.

So, while Elliott has toyed with the idea of going further and moving to a four-day week, he says: “I wouldn’t go to a four-day week without getting the DfE on board.”

Yet, times are changing. That a four-day week is now being seriously discussed in schools shows as much. Restructuring the school week, as many schools have already demonstrated, can profoundly change the feel and priorities of a school - and the experience of being a teacher.