It’s been a week of swirling speculation about extending the school day - an issue that has appeared on and off throughout the pandemic.

Ministers once seemed warm to the notion. Indeed, even after the government rejected the proposals of its appointed recovery commissioner Sir Kevan Collins in July, the prime minister still said creating a longer day was “the right thing to do.”

But chancellor Rishi Sunak clearly thought differently and was not prepared to part with the sums of money necessary to add activities beyond the final bell, thus leaving the new education secretary, Nadhim Zahawi, with the task of extricating the government from a powerful proposal that has now evidently lost favour.

A longer school day for Covid catch-up?

One of the champions of the idea of an extended school day is Commons Education Select Committee chair Robert Halfon, who quizzed the education secretary twice on the subject this week: in the House of Commons on Monday and at a select committee hearing on Wednesday.

Mr Zahawi’s response was to talk vaguely about some excellent examples of a longer school day in some multi-academy trusts that he is going to look at,

He said the average school day is currently six-and-a-half hours, and that he would like to see every school move up to that.

Whether this will produce anything further down the line is anyone’s guess.

It sounds like an effort to kick the issue into the long grass. Even if it does result in some policy initiative, perhaps via the forthcoming White Paper, without serious additional funding it is unlikely to prove much more than wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, a gruel-thin review of the evidence about the length of the school days appeared on the Department for Education website late this week and suggested that any universal change would involve “significant delivery considerations” and that it was more feasible to deliver an increase in hours in 16 to 19 education.

That perhaps explains the Budget announcement of a bit of extra funding for a bit of extra time for some students in further education colleges.

Multiple challenges

Aside from the fact that a review that is five pages long hardly seems to do justice to a subject of such potential importance, it does rather sound like the death knell for the whole extended day initiative.

And that business about encouraging schools to move up to the average of 6.5-hour days needs a bit of context.

This relates to a DfE-commissioned survey conducted in March, which found that the average day across all schools was 6 hours and 28 minutes.

It also found that 93 per cent of schools reported that their school day lasted between six and seven hours, which seems pretty consistent to me. Only 1 per cent of schools reported having a day that was less than six hours.

So it’s not quite clear what problem the government is trying to solve or, indeed, why a government would possibly feel it knows better than heads and governors how a school should timetable its lessons and breaktimes.

All in all, we shouldn’t be all that surprised that the idea of an extended school day has foundered - on lack of evidence, lack of funding and, ultimately, lack of ambition.

Whilst there may, indeed, be a sense of understandable relief among those who feared that extending the school day would end up piling yet more pressure on teachers and leaders, that most definitely wasn’t in Sir Kevan Collins’ plan.

He was exuding an ambition that went way beyond some mechanistic tinkering with half an hour tagged at the end of the day.

How more time should be used

After all, many of us believe that it’s in the activities beyond the core school day - the sport, the arts, the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award scheme, the debating society - that success in the classroom is forged and young people’s character developed.

Certainly, many of our most vibrant and successful schools - both state and independent - know how a rich diet of extracurricular experiences leads to success in the classroom and in life.

But, as ever, too often it is the disadvantaged who miss out - young people for whom these opportunities cannot be offered and families who simply don’t have the spending power to give their children these additional experiences.

So, from a government that bangs on robotically about levelling up, providing such opportunities to every child from every background could have built an extraordinary educational legacy.

To be feasible, it needed to be a properly funded and planned strategy that provided the resources necessary to deliver after-school provision on a national scale. That’s why it is expensive.

Framed in that way, there is a lot of merit in the idea. Sir Kevan Collins obviously thought so and the recommendation also appeared in a recovery plan from the Education Policy Institute.

 A well-resourced offer of after-school sport, cultural and academic activities that is universally available to children, whatever their background, has the potential to be truly transformative.

Shrinking ambitions

What is perhaps most concerning about all of this is that - whatever your views on the merits or otherwise of an extended school day - the abandonment of the idea feels like a shrinking of ambitions.

Even Robert Halfon’s fairly modest and reasonable suggestion of running a pilot project has fallen on stony ground. One can only hope this is not the shape of things to come.

Because the education system needs a shot in the arm of new, fresh ideas to tackle entrenched problems - most notably, the persistent gap in attainment between disadvantaged children and their peers.

Those pupils need a government that - like the teaching profession itself - is genuinely ambitious on their behalf.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders