Length of the School Week

Dave Robertson Excerpts

Monday 5th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Dave Robertson (Lichfield) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered e-petition 727514 relating to the length of the school week.

It is a pleasure to take part in a debate in which you are presiding, Mrs Hobhouse, and to move this motion on behalf of the Petitions Committee, especially because I was a secondary school teacher for almost a decade before I came to this place. The petition calls on the Government to reduce the school week from five days to four, while making each of the remaining school days one hour longer.

Ahead of these debates, I always try to speak with the petition’s creator to get a sense of why they started it, and I spoke with the creator of this petition before the Christmas break. He joins us in the Gallery with his mother, who is a teacher herself, and that is a central part of the reason why he began the petition. He had learned in school that almost a third of teachers leave the profession within five years. He hoped that a four-day school week would give teachers more time to spend with their families and encourage them to stay in the classroom—where we all want our best teachers to be—and he thinks that pupils could use their day out of school to do volunteering or other positive things in their local community

The proposal attracted significant interest; the petition has been signed by more than 126,000 people. Unfortunately, I do not have a breakdown of the ages of those signatories—[Laughter.] However, I suspect—and the laughter tells me that colleagues do too—that, given that this issue affects so many young people, many of the people who signed the petition may well be of school age. I think it is important that we bring their views into this debate.

Last month, I had the privilege of meeting secondary school pupils visiting Parliament, who were constituents of the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), and hearing their thoughts about this idea. I spoke to some Back Benchers before going, and they said, “Well, of course they’re going to support it; it’s another day off school,” but yet again, adults overlooked how seriously young people would take it. Before we dismiss their enthusiasm out of hand, there are some really important things to consider that underpinned their interest. Yes, they liked the idea, but more than 15% said that they thought it would reduce school absences, and more than a quarter thought that it would improve their mental health.

That is a really serious point. The most recent NHS children and young people’s mental health survey found that one in five children aged eight to 16 had a probable mental health condition. We know that mental health concerns among young people have risen since the covid-19 pandemic, when many were so isolated. Factors such as climate change, extremism in politics and the cost of housing leave many young people feeling pessimistic about the future.

The pupils I spoke to also had some serious questions about the proposal, and went straight for the logistics of how it would work. Three big worries came through. The main argument against the idea, particularly among the pupils we polled, was that a longer day would be too tiring and that, by the time people got to what I referred to as period 6 when I was in school and when I was teaching—the sixth hour of the day—brains would be overused and they would not be quite as productive. Some thought that they would get more homework, that it would be harder to do it on top of longer school days, and that that would mean a reduction in the face-to-face time they got with their teachers.

Other pupils had questions about where the new periods would be added. Would they get extra breaks? Would the period go at the start or the end of the day? Older pupils, in particular, were concerned about the impact on their exams. Their school had six 50-minute lessons a day, and they were worried about where the lost hours would come from if they got 200 minutes back in four additional 50-minute lessons.

The final concern that came through strongly, which is easy to overlook but is vital when we consider this issue, was safety. Many pupils pointed out that, despite attending a school on the edge of a major city and having much better access to street lighting than some in rural areas such as the one I represent, a longer school day would mean that they would go home or to school in the dark, especially in the winter. It would be even worse if they wanted to do an extracurricular activity for an hour after school, in which case it could well be 5.30 pm or close to 6 pm by the time they went home. As we see outside today, it can be very dark at 6.05 pm. A number of pupils expressed real concern about whether they would be safe walking home in the dark if the proposed change were made.

[Dr Scott Arthur (Edinburgh South West) (Lab)]

This is a devolved issue, but I did post about it on my Facebook page, because it is an interesting question—I think the post had about 100,000 views and just under 400 comments. One of the challenges that people brought up, which I think my hon. Friend missed from his list, was the impact of longer days on kids with additional support needs, and how their learning might be supported in the classroom as well as on the day off. We have to acknowledge the impact on students and their learning, but does he agree that we also have to think about the impact on children with additional support needs and their families?

[Dave Robertson]

My hon. Friend makes an important contribution. So often the system has been designed in one way and within it there is huge complexity, particularly when it comes to pupils with additional needs or special educational needs and disabilities. Redesigning the entire school week would obviously mean redesigning many of the other support factors that go around it. That point could easily be missed if we looked at this issue without the required detail. My hon. Friend’s level of social media engagement shames me; I shall have a drink with him later to ask how he is getting on with it.

In addition to meeting pupils from the constituency of the right hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North, I spoke to the National Association of Head Teachers. It shared some of their concerns, especially around mental health, but ultimately did not think that this proposal was the answer. In the NAHT’s view, the best way to ease the strain on pupils would be to reduce course content and the number of exams at the end of courses.

The NAHT had a number of other issues with the proposal. One was the impact it would have on extracurricular activities, which I have already mentioned. That is especially important, because pupils cited that as one of the main reasons for supporting the proposal: they wanted more time away from school to do volunteering or non-curricular stuff from which they get some value. The NAHT worried that the school day running later could mean fewer clubs for sports, music and similar things at the end of the day, and ultimately a less rich offer for pupils. A wealth of educational evidence shows that access to extracurricular activities is one of the things that helps to close attainment gaps right across the country.

The NAHT also worried that an earlier start to the school day would have a bad impact on secondary pupils. Studies show that teenagers’ sleep patterns mean they are best prepared to learn when they have slightly later starts, not earlier ones. Overall, like the pupils who opposed the petition, the NAHT was concerned that a longer school day would be too tiring, especially for primary school pupils, who need breaks and shorter spells of concentration to learn at their best.

Importantly, the NAHT recognised the impact on parents. For someone who works five days a week, suddenly needing to provide childcare on one of those days would be a huge challenge. I am a former teacher, and one of the things that always used to wind me up about debates like this was hearing people say, “But what about childcare?” I used to lose my mind, because teachers do so much more than childcare. However, it is a fact that if the kids are in school, their childcare is taken care of, and that taking kids out of school for one day a week would leave a huge void to be filled. Access to childcare is one of the major issues that affects young families, and this proposal would exacerbate that rather than solve it.

However, the NAHT did agree with the petitioners, as I do, that there is a significant problem with teacher retention. Britain has the youngest teaching workforce in the OECD. Not only are teachers leaving the profession, but many are unwilling to take on leadership roles, because the work is just so heavy, especially in primary schools. The NAHT favours a four-day teaching week—five days of classes, but a day a week for teachers to focus on lesson prep and administration, which we used to call PPA back in my day—and making the job more sustainable.

Before I conclude, I want to say something from my personal experience as a classroom teacher for almost a decade. I had the great privilege of working at the largest school in the country. We had a 15-form entry, so we had 15 classes in each year group; we had 2,500 kids on site every day and more than 300 staff. I was the school’s principal union rep during my time there. In 2015, we trialled something very similar to this proposal as a way of trying to push attainment up, to make sure that every kid who could just get over that grade got over that grade. We cancelled all staff meetings, we cancelled all staff time with other staff, and we did everything for contact. We put on a period 6—an additional hour at the end of every day. All of my members said, “You know what? If this is for the good of the kids and the school, let’s try it. Let’s give it a go and see what happens.”

We all went for it, and it was such hard work to put on valuable sessions for that sixth hour of the day. When we came to do an analysis in the September, we could not find that it had made any difference, positive or negative. What we found from doing it—having to move all this stuff around and the additional workload that came with it—was that the reason why the school day is six hours long, and has been six hours long for so long, is that that is what brains are designed to learn in. Adding that sixth hour had almost no impact—certainly no measurable impact—on pupil outcomes, and we had a big enough sample size to give at least some credence to the conclusion.

It is clear from the Government’s written response to the petition that they do not support the proposal, and there are clear reasons for that, but I would be interested to hear the Minister’s views on some of the themes that underpin the petition, because it is also clear that there were reasons for starting it that relate to children’s mental health, opportunities for hobbies and volunteering, and retention of experienced teachers in order to give our children the best start possible.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dave Robertson]

Again, I thank the petitioners and the petition creator for making sure could discuss this issue. I also thank all those who contributed to this debate: my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South West (Dr Arthur), who showed his support for pupils with additional educational needs; my hon. Friend the Member for Worthing West (Dr Cooper), who gave her views on the health and wider implications of how such a change might function and its place within the larger debate; and the hon. Member for South Devon (Caroline Voaden), who raised the important issue of teacher retention. The median length of a teaching career has been decreasing for years. When the treadmill is that short, it does not matter how fast people are shuffled on to it if they fall off the back just as fast. However, I caution her on one point: we have world-class teachers in our classrooms up and down the country.

I also thank the hon. Member for West Suffolk (Nick Timothy) for sharing a rare moment of policy agreement across all the major parties. I am sure normal service will be resumed very soon. We may have to agree to disagree on the simple idea that more education means better outcomes, because I am not entirely certain that it is linear—I think that a maximum can be reached, but I am sure that we can have that debate at length another time. I am also not sure that any robust evidence links school structures, academies and free schools to better outcomes on their own. It is teachers who make excellent education, not school structures.

Finally, I thank my hon. Friend the Minister, who has first-hand experience as a teacher, for raising the importance of extracurricular activities as well as the impact that inflexible working has on retention and the ways that we can work around that to support teachers in the classroom. He may, however, have missed an opportunity to flag up Labour’s excellent Employment Rights Act 2025 as part of that.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered e-petition 727514 relating to the length of the school week.