In French schools, lunchtime is seen as a lesson where pupils learn to eat good food in a civilised manner - it is not just 20 minutes “where you have to stuff your face as fast as you can”, explains US documentary maker Michael Moore in his film Where To Invade Next.

The film, released in 2015, looks at which social policies the US might want to adopt, and features Moore visiting a primary school in rural Normandy, where he joins pupils for one of their hour-long lunches - which includes a scallop starter, as well as a cheese course.

Pupils in France are entitled to 30 minutes each day to eat their lunch; that half hour is the time they spend sitting at the table and should not include any time spent waiting for the meal. The entire lunch break in French schools often takes up to two hours.

We might still use the term “lunch hour” to refer to the school lunch break, but pupils and teachers have no right to 60 minutes.

As schools standards minister Nick Gibb told Radio 4 recently, in his own constituency, children are only having around half that.

“It worries me; children should have breaks and be running around the playground getting exercise and making friends,” he said. “I see children leaving at a quarter to three and you know they’ve only had a half-hour break for lunch.”

The curtailing of lunchtime has implications for pupils’ ability to take part in sport, to rehearse for the school play or to join the debating society, particularly in rural areas, where the need to get on a bus at the end of the day might interfere with after-school activities and clubs.

Researchers from UCL Institute of Education recently revealed the situation is so dire that children “barely have enough time to queue up and to eat their lunch, let alone have time for other things”.

The academics have been tracking the erosion of breaktimes across the school day since the mid-1990s. The latest data was published last month (May) and involved more than 1,000 primary and secondary schools. It showed that, in 2017, children aged 5-7 had 45 minutes less break time per week than children of the same age in 1995, and pupils aged 11-16 had 65 minutes less.

The findings show that the amount of free time pupils get outside lessons is inversely related to their age, so the younger a child is, the more time they are likely to get for play and recreation. In 1995, less than a third of secondary schools (30 per cent) reported lunch breaks of less than 55 minutes, but by 2017 that figure had risen to 82 per cent, and a quarter of secondaries reported lunchtimes of 35 minutes or less.

As a result of their findings, the researchers are now calling for the government to legislate to guarantee a minimum amount of time out of class for pupils.

“Adults, including teachers, have a right to a lunchtime period often as part of their contracts so it’s surprising pupils don’t,” says the report’s lead author Ed Baines.

In an era when concerns about children’s mental and physical health abound, it seems counterintuitive that opportunities for pupils to socialise, exercise and relax are curtailed.

As Baines puts it: “Not only are breaktimes an opportunity for children to get physical exercise - an issue of particular concern given the rise in obesity - but they provide valuable time to make friends and to develop important social skills: experiences that are not necessarily learned or taught in formal lessons.”

‘An awful lot to fit in’

Concerns about managing the behaviour of any pupils allowed to leave school grounds during lunchtime and worries about their safety have been suggested as one factor.

But Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, cites the “constant pressure on the timetable” as the main reason behind shorter breaks.

“I suspect shorter breaks will have happened over the years as schools have come to set their timetables from one year to the next and have been trying to accommodate everything that is endlessly expected of them,” he reasons.

“There is an awful lot to fit into the school day. For example, the latest set of GCSE reforms have increased the amount of content that pupils have to learn. And the stakes attached to those exams are very high, both for the school and the individual pupil, so schools absolutely have to make sure that the curriculum is delivered and pupils are well prepared.

“In addition to all the academic demands, schools are expected to provide sports, enrichment and personal, social, health and economic education. So, there is constant pressure on the timetable, and this has probably been the main factor in breaktimes being trimmed back over the years.

“Behaviour may also have been a factor because it is obviously more difficult to keep an eye on pupils during break and lunchtimes, with the inevitable cost of supervision, and this may sometimes have been a consideration in timetabling, particularly where there is challenging behaviour.”

When it comes to the lunch break being reduced to control behaviour, the UCL academics are sympathetic.

In their paper, “School break and lunch times and young people’s social lives: a follow-up national study”, the researchers say it is clear that difficulties can arise at breaktime and it is understandable that schools would want to limit poor behaviour. However, they stress that “pupils’ views about breaktimes were at odds with the views of school staff”.

The researchers state: “The vast majority of students viewed breaktimes very positively and valued the social opportunities they allow, as well as the opportunities for eating and drinking. Pupils would, in fact, prefer break and lunch times to be longer and would like to see an easing of constraints on enjoyable activities, and more opportunities for activities to engage in.”

The Department for Education puts the onus on headteachers who, it points out, have been given autonomy to make decisions about the structure and duration of their school day. It says headteachers should make sure pupils are given an “appropriate break” and says it recognises the importance of physical activity in schools to improve both physical and mental wellbeing.

However, not all teachers are supportive of a return to longer lunches, because the knock-on effect would be a later finish to the school day. Olivia Drennan, a social studies faculty head based in Glasgow, says she gets a 45-minute break three days a week and 40 minutes the other two days. The pupils would like a longer lunch, but she believes most staff prefer the earlier finishing time.

“Pupils feel it is too short and it means few extracurricular clubs now run at lunchtime,” says Drennan. “However, the majority of staff prefer a shorter lunch and an earlier finishing time, particularly as many run supported study sessions after school, and it means these can be finished for 4.30pm.

“Personally, I feel it’s a shame extracurricular clubs are getting less attention due to the pressure to raise attainment via formal supported study and homework clubs. I think debates, sports and so on help give kids a more rounded education and could also help relieve their stress, which should mean they achieve better.”

Join our clubs

That is certainly the theory in the independent sector. Pupils at the High School of Glasgow get just over an hour for lunch - one hour and five minutes, to be precise - and at the start of every year the school runs a clubs and societies fair, where there are more than 80 different activities on offer, with senior pupils and staff vying to sign up the younger pupils.

Not all of the activities take place at lunchtime - some run after school - but many do, says the school’s headteacher, John O’Neill. These activities range from musical ensembles and the school choir to bridge club and chess club.

The school, whose day starts at 8.50am and finishes at 3.45pm, also has 10 minutes for registration every day, a 20-minute assembly and a 20-minute morning break. In a sector often accused of hothousing pupils, that is a lot of downtime, especially when you consider that registration is another slice of time outside of formal lessons that is increasingly coming under threat in the state sector.

The UCL researchers, funded by the Nuffield Foundation, looked at how the state and independent sectors in England compared, and they concluded that independent schools had longer breaktimes than state schools, and also ran a wider range of clubs during breaktimes - but not after school.

Like Drennan, O’Neill sees all of this wider activity as being intrinsically linked to attainment. He argues it creates a culture of participation that pays off when pupils are back in class.

“By S2 [Year 8], a pupil might be in two clubs at lunchtime and spend the other three lunchtimes with their friends kicking a ball about, or going to the library to do some extra work, or just having some social time chilling out in the courtyard with each other,” says O’Neill. “That’s a critical thing in the school day - that opportunity to be away from the classroom environment, that time to socially engage and relax.

“My view has consistently been that we are trying - through devoting that time and planning to that period and giving children the ability to choose - to create an environment in which participation is the norm, getting involved is the norm, and that just makes school that bit more fun and social. Then when children go into the classroom they feel more disposed to learning a bit of calculus because they have had some time out for themselves.”

However, the onus is also clearly on teachers to step up and run the societies and clubs. O’Neill admits - as is the case in a lot of independent schools - that when a teacher joins his school there is “an expectation they will get involved in a club”. The consensus seems to be, though, that this culture went out of the window in the state sector at the time of the teacher strikes in the 1980s and, to a large extent, has never been resurrected.

Shorter lunchtimes seem unlikely to reverse that trend. So, the critical question seems to be: are the changes to the way the school day is organised making it increasingly difficult for teachers to find the time and space to share their passions?

Emma Seith is a reporter at Tes Scotland. Dave Speck is a reporter at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 14 June 2019 issue under the headline “Give us a break!”