Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi has said he would like to see all schools move towards being open for six and half hours a day.

In his first education questions since being in post with a confirmed new team, Zahawi told MPs that he wanted to see schools moving toward the current average, which is 6.5 hours, and that he was looking at some “excellent examples” of multi-academy trusts that run longer days.

His comments in Parliament today came in response to a question from the chair of the Commons Education Committee Robert Halfon, who asked if he will continue to make the case for a longer school day.

The length of the school day has been at the heart of controversy over Covid-19 catch-up funding.

The government’s former education recovery commissioner Sir Kevan Collins resigned from his post when extending the day was not included in the Department for Education’s plans earlier this year.

Mr Halfon said: “We know from the Education Policy Institute that it increases educational attainment from two to three months, especially amongst disadvantaged pupils.

“We know that a longer school day, according to the department for culture, media, sports, increases numeracy by 29 per cent. So, this increases educational attainment.

“Will he at least consider some pilot schemes in disadvantaged areas around the country where we can have a longer school day?”

Mr Zahawi said: “I think the priority has to be for those children and students, who have the least time available to them to recover, which is why the £800 million for the 16- to 19-year-olds additional 40 hours of education is so important. Plus the £1 billion going into secondary and primary, making the total £5 billion of recovery money.

“There are some excellent examples in some MATs of a longer school day which I’m going to look at. The average school day now is 6.5 hours and I would like to see everybody move towards that average.”

Schools must be protected from ‘anti-vaxxers’

Mr Zahawi said that pupils needed to be protected from anti-vaccination protests taking place outside school gates, but stopped short of saying whether he would implement Labour’s suggested policy of exclusion zones outside schools.

Peter Kyle, shadow schools minister, said schools had become testing and vaccination centres for Covid.

“Instead of having a wall of protective adults which he [the SoS] said to me would be the case, students are faced with a wall of pinched and angry anti-vaxxers who are preventing them from getting into the school by bullying, harassing and interrupting their school flow,” Mr Kyle said.

Mr Kyle asked if Mr Zahawi would accept Labour’s proposal to introduce exclusion zones for the duration of the vaccination rollout.

And he asked whether the secretary of state would apologise to the 200,000 pupils off school after he took the decision not to offer young people the vaccine over the summer months.

Mr Zahawi said it was the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation that made the call initially on vaccinating 12- to 15-year-olds.

He added that home secretary Priti Patel would make any resource available for schools to combat anti-vaccination protests.

“We moved swiftly as soon as that advice was made available to vaccinate 12- to 15-year-olds and of course through the holiday period that was expanded to out of school vaccination and now they are returning back into school that continues at pace,” Mr Zahawi said.

“But he [Mr Kyle] is right to highlight the dangerous behaviour of some anti-vaxxers - there is no place for anti-vaxxers harassing or coming anywhere near school leavers and I have the assurance of the home secretary that she’ll make any resource available that the sector needs to make sure that those people in our schools are protected and able to get on with the job of teaching children.”

Evaluation of the National Tutoring Programme

Mr Zahawi said that the government’s flagship National Tutoring Programme would be independently evaluated when questioned about how well it was reaching the most disadvantaged pupils. 

He said that the NTP had reached 308,000 pupils in 2020-21 and would be expanding to provide tuition to 2 million pupils.

Asked about the fact that only 240,000 pupils were enrolled with the NTP in its first year and whether there would be “granular information” made available about how the NTP was reaching the most disadvantaged, Mr Zahawi said there was an ongoing independent evaluation of the programme’s impact.

“The academic year’s independent evaluation is taking place and will assess the programme’s impact on pupils’ educational attainment in all regions, including the North, and of course we will publish that,” he said.

“Provisional figures from our delivery partner shows so far this year 3,822 schools have engaged with the programme through the tuition partners and academic mentors, and the latest reports show that 475 academic mentors have been placed in schools in the most disadvantaged areas of England, and on top of this all schools are sharing over half a billion, £579 million, to recruit their own local tutors.”

Zahawi asked if he is happy with Randstad delivery of NTP

Mr Zahawi was questioned by his Labour counterpart Kate Green over how nearly 2 million young people would have left school by the end of the NTP period without support including over half a million estimated in the North.

The shadow education secretary also suggested the “new cut-price Randstad contract has left schools facing over-complicated bureaucracy and tutoring delayed.”

“Is the secretary of state satisfied with the performance of Randstad’s management of the contract?” she said.

“I’m grateful to my honourable lady - I’m never satisfied until we’ve delivered because ultimately we can have an arms race of how much we can spend - it’s all about outcomes,” Mr Zahawi said.