Secondary School Opening Hours

Mike Kane Excerpts

Monday 11th February 2019 Westminster Hall

[Mike Kane (Wythenshawe and Sale East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Main. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge (Daniel Zeichner) on moving the petition so eloquently on behalf of the Petitions Committee, and Hannah Kidner on coming up with the idea for a petition that has attracted so much support in such a short space of time. She can be very proud indeed that she has made Parliament act on her idea; I will go into why I think it was so popular.

On first reading the title of the petition, that school should start at 10 am as teenagers are too tired, many people will have dismissed the idea—hon. Members have made that case—but there is a growing body of opinion that starting the school day later would be better for teenagers, both in terms of their physical and mental health, which I will come on to, and in relation to their academic performance.

When I researched this debate, I found a 2017 study by Dr Paul Kelley of the Open University. It was conducted at an English secondary school that showed that delaying school start times for teenagers can have major benefits, including better academic performance and improved mental and physical health. The study found that rates of illness decreased by more than half over a two-year period and students in their mid-teens got significantly better grades when they started school at 10 am instead of the usual 8.30 am.

As has been pointed out by several hon. Members, however, children across the world are sleeping less. Here in the UK, the national health service is seeing more serious problems than before, with hospital attendances for children under 14 with sleep disorders tripling in the past 10 years. British schoolchildren are the sixth most sleep-deprived in the world, with American children topping the rankings. There are likely to be a number of sources for that problem, as the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) pointed out, with mobile phone and tablet use featuring high on the list. More than 80% of children in the UK now have their own phone by the age of 12, while 58% have their own tablet by the age of 10, and two thirds of teenagers say they use those devices in the hour before they go to bed. As it happens, it is one of my personal rules not to do that.

Let us face it: we have all become slaves to these devices, and parents must be role models and set an example in that area. Indeed, the Minister has made the issue the focus of his attention in recent weeks, suggesting that our schools should ban mobile phones altogether. I think that suggestion got rather more attention than he ever thought it might when he made it.

I think the reason why so many young people signed this petition is that they see mental health going up their agenda. The hon. Member for Linlithgow and East Falkirk (Martyn Day) mentioned that we in Parliament start our day at 2.30 pm on a Monday, but my day started at 9 o’clock with a visit to a company in my constituency called Endress+Hauser, a major manufacturer of pressurised equipment across the continent. Its representatives told me about their workplace practices, changing times to improve people’s mental health and having full staff sessions on anxiety and their mental health and wellbeing. It is a rising agenda.

We know that the number of young people attending accident and emergency departments for a psychiatric condition more than doubled between 2010 and 2015; I think that is particularly what young people are worried about. Just 8% of the mental health budget is spent on children, despite their representing 20% of the population. Any MP with a constituency case load will have more and more parents coming to see them about special educational needs and trying to get that provision through local authorities, their multi-academy trusts and child and adolescent mental health services provision. Referrals to CAMHS increased by 64% between 2012-13 and 2014-15, but more than one quarter of children and young people referred were not allocated a service.

What is hampering schools in making a change? Today in Tes, the Government were criticised for school budget cuts that lead to less innovation in our schools, particularly relating to education technology. The Minister and I are no strangers to that. In the current climate, it is difficult for schools to make such changes, even innovative changes to the school day, when £1.7 billion in real terms has been taken out of the school system since 2015. As my hon. Friend the Member for Cambridge said, every state school is facing a crisis.

Our schools need the Government to take an honest approach to the issue. We must act now and give our children and teenagers the knowledge and confidence to take charge of their own mental health and wellbeing. The current system gives schools the autonomy to organise the school day in a way that best suits their pupils, in conjunction with the wider community. If schools want to change their times, and do so effectively, they must work through a framework and a form of subsidiarity in their local authority area or more widely. If certain countries that make up the United Kingdom—or conurbations such as Greater Manchester or Merseyside, which have their own mayoral systems—consider doing so, I do not think that any of us would be averse to that. They should come back with ideas.

The subject of the petition merits proper consideration by the Department for Education, particularly the underlying challenges faced by teenagers and the ability of our schools and teachers to support them while facing sustained budget cuts and increasing workloads. I congratulate my hon. Friend again on his considered introduction of the petition, and Hannah Kidner on bringing it to Parliament and gaining so many signatures in such a short space of time.