Welcome to Nap Club. The first rule of Nap Club is: you do not talk about Nap Club. Actually, that’s not true. While it would be a useful journalistic analogy if Nap Clubs - literally a club where teenagers can nap while at school - resembled the fictitious Fight Club of novel and film fame, you can talk about Nap Club; indeed, it is very much encouraged. Because, in the few US high schools where it has been rolled out, the benefits have been significant.

The idea of letting students nap may, at first, seem an odd one: usually, falling asleep in school hours gets you a sanction. But the evidence around the importance of sleep for learning and behaviour has persuaded some schools to take a different tack.

Dr Linda Summers, a school nurse in New Mexico, looked into the effects of sleep for disruptive or distressed students. They ended up in the nurse’s office where they were told to lie down and relax, so they could get back into the right frame of mind for learning. They often fell asleep and, upon waking, were in a much better place mentally and could rejoin the class with no further trouble.

So, problem solved? Not really. Summers couldn’t have her office crowded with students all trying to nap, and the space was simply not set up to help young people get some shut-eye. Also, Summers’ reading showed the optimum time for effective naps was 20 minutes and the students would sometimes sleep for too long.

Summers found the solution by chance: she spotted an advertisement for what sounded like the perfect “power nap” experience - a sleep pod. These futuristic-looking cocoons are popular with Silicon Valley companies that want to facilitate optimising sleep for staff. Summers saw no reason why they could not work for students, too.

“We were able to buy a pod for the school,” she explains.” [Pretty soon after], there was a situation where we had two students who were arguing, and we put one in the pod - and he came out all chilled - and then the other went in and he came out all chilled.”

Peace in a pod

Rather than being egg-like, the pods are a type of chair: the napper sits, then their legs are lifted and they are manoeuvred into a “zero-gravity position”, which is basically a stretched-out seated position with your body angled slightly backwards. The napper can partly, or completely, close a hood over the top. That’s when the fun begins: there is specially designed music, along with chair vibrations and a light show to help them settle. After 20 minutes, the chair returns to its normal seated position. There are more vibrations, music and lights, and then the person is brought round from their sleep.

After the device was installed in Summers’ school, she spotted a study by academics at New Mexico State University and the University of San Francisco, who were evaluating the impact of different stress-reduction sleep pods on students’ levels of agitation. She signed up. In the research, when students in four different schools in New Mexico felt agitated, or showed signs of agitation, they were allowed to sit in one of the two different sleep pods used in the trial. The students completed the Profile of Mood States Short Form (POMS-SF) - a measure of psychological distress used commonly in academic studies - pre- and post-intervention.

The result? Regardless of the pod used, the mood of all participants in the study improved after sleep.

Summer says her experience with the pod supports the finding: “Regardless of the problem that the adolescent was having - be it an argument with a girlfriend or boyfriend, lack of sleep or a problem in class - if they went into the pod for 20 minutes, whether they fell asleep or not, they calmed down.

“I also work as a therapist, and I found that it was no good trying to talk to the student after they had been in for a nap because, afterwards, they’d come out and say ‘I’m good, Miss’ and just want to leave to return to their lesson. The effect was like doing yoga but sped up and super-fast.”

Summers attributes the success to the fact that students were taken “out of their heads” while in the pod.

“What we were doing before that was just waiting,” she explains. “And the problem with waiting is that the adolescent was thinking it over and getting more anxious, and that took more time.

“But if they went to sleep, they awoke feeling less agitated.”

To sleep, perchance to learn

There is some hard science behind this. Psychological studies have shown that naps can elevate a person’s mood by improving their emotional regulation. Naps have also been shown to boost alertness and concentration, as well as energy levels.

An added bonus, according to Professor Michael Chee, director of the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke-NUS Medical School, Singapore, is that napping has also been shown to be an effective method for improving students’ memory.

“We compared the outcomes of remembering facts in three conditions using undergraduates,” Chee explains. “The subjects had two sessions of learning and then one of three different conditions - cramming, napping or watching a movie - and then another two sessions of learning. What we found was that, after the final learning session, both the cramming and napping group were able to recall more information than the group who watched a movie.

“But what was really interesting was that, after one week, only the napping group showed a significant difference in recollection compared with the other two groups.”

Given the benefits, you might wonder why more schools aren’t doing it. Then you speak to headteachers and realise that there are a fair few issues. The first is cost: the pods are around $13,000 (£10,500). Each. There aren’t many schools where such an outlay could be justified.

Meanwhile, Chris Hildrew, headteacher at Churchill Academy and Sixth Form in North Somerset, foresees practical problems. “I would certainly not think about implementing it at my school,” he says. “Quite aside from the missed curriculum time, lack of space and the physical resources required, I would imagine the safeguarding implications of sleeping arrangements would be enough to give anyone pause for thought. It’s a no from me.”

Heads also warn of the risk that pupils will see the nap pod as a way to bunk off lessons, rather than a method to reduce their stress.

However, not everyone is completely in the “no” camp. Vic Goddard, principal at Passmores School in Essex, can see the benefits. “We have sensory spaces in our school already - to help with our young people with autism - and this just feels like a futuristic answer to the same issue,” he says. “We have young people who create their own dark spaces within our ASD [autism spectrum disorder] hub when they need to, so this has to be more comfortable than that.”

And Summers has no regrets about using the pods in her school. She says that, as long as the rules are enforced (only one person per bed - no co-napping; lights off; clothes on, shoes off; no nap longer than 20 minutes), the scheme runs with few issues.

Still not convinced? Well, maybe you should sleep on it.

Grainne Hallahan is senior content writer at Tes. She tweets @heymrshallahan

This article originally appeared in the 11 October 2019 issue under the headline “Is Nap Club a dream come true?”