Length of the School Week

Nick Timothy Excerpts

Monday 5th January 2026 Westminster Hall

[Nick Timothy (West Suffolk) (Con)]

I wish you, Mrs Hobhouse, all Members, Clerks and staff of Parliament, and our visitors today a happy new year. I am pleased to respond to the debate on the length of the school week.

I thank the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) for leading the debate and I congratulate the young people behind the petition who have brought us together to discuss it here. I confess I have not told my own children what I am doing this evening; I hope they are not watching the Parliament channel for the first time in their lives, because my job tonight is to complete the party consensus and disappoint the signatories. While we have heard some valid arguments about teacher recruitment and retention and how the reality of school works for many children, the challenges that we have heard about are probably best met with solutions other than shortening the school week.

Broadly speaking, we have more knowledge and data about what works in education that ever before, which gives us some confidence in saying we know how to make education work best for young people. Success obviously depends on rewarding excellence and raising standards, and the research shows that reducing the length of the school week would mean fewer opportunities to learn and improve. Less time spent with teachers in the classroom would lead to fewer activities and teaching hours, especially for the most deprived children, who might lack alternatives to those activities away from their schools. If anything, we need children to spend more time at school so they can enjoy the greatest possible benefit from full-time education.

Of course, there should be a balance: schools create opportunities for children to learn social skills, make friends, explore new interests and be active, and no one here wants children to be constantly working without rest or support, especially when they are struggling. However, our schools would be unbalanced by the loss of an entire school day. It is not credible that five days of learning and activity could be realistically compressed into four. Cutting lesson times would harm children, especially those who are struggling the most and need more help.

Not only children, but families would suffer. A four-day week would see more than a month’s worth of school time lost over a year. That is 39 days gone—much more than people’s total holiday entitlement. The loss of a whole day would force many working parents to find alternative childcare arrangements at huge personal expense. The cost of childcare, already incredibly high, would go up even further because of the spike in demand, while many other parents would simply work fewer hours or leave their jobs to look after children when they were not in school.

Campaigners for a shorter week believe that those problems can be made up for by extending the length of the remaining four days. The petition we are debating today proposed that we add an extra hour to each school day, but that would still mean two and a half hours being lost every week. Even if we extended the school day to a full eight hours under a four-day week schedule, children would be left with fewer hours of education each week.

Under the Conservatives, the minimum length of the school week was extended to 32 and a half hours, which helped children to master their subjects, discover new ones, get catch-up support, receive personalised tutoring and enjoy more extracurricular activities. Schools in Wales, where education is not run by the Conservatives, have also trialled longer school days. A four-day week would leave us a global outlier, with English children having less school time than their peers in other developed countries.

We know that more time spent in school leads to better outcomes. The Education Policy Institute has reviewed a series of global studies, and found

“a more pronounced impact on the academic outcomes of pupils from lower socio-economic backgrounds”.

The Education Endowment Foundation has also reviewed studies from multiple countries, and concluded that extended school time can deliver an average gain of three months’ additional progress for children—four months for children in primary schools, and two months for children in secondary schools.

There is significant evidence of this working in England. The DFE’s 2003 to 2010 extended schools and services programme, covering 1,500 schools, featured longer school days as part of its pilot scheme. That contributed towards 74% of schools seeing higher pupil engagement in learning and 82% higher pupil engagement in school, as well as a 54% reduction in discipline problems.

Research shows that the most deprived schools benefited: nearly six in 10 children on free school meals thought the scheme made an impact on schools with more than 20% of pupils on free school meals, but that falls to four in 10 children for schools with less than 20% of children on free school meals. Parents also agreed: surveys showed that 35% of parents believed their child’s grades improved as a result, 56% observed their child enjoying learning more and 58% saw their child demonstrating better language skills and being better socialised.

Longer school days are an important part of delivering more and better enrichment. Thanks to the academies and free schools revolution, that insight has been put into practice, with impressive results. Star Academies’ Eden Girls’ school delivers extra enrichment and learning through additional time between 3 pm and 3.45 pm. It is rated outstanding. Teachers play their part in that extra time, but the school has innovated by working with charities and community groups to give extra activities to its pupils, which means that teachers are enablers rather than being overburdened.

Extended school days have been introduced at St Martin’s academy, from 8.30 am to 4 pm, alongside full wraparound care to help parents. The school was rated outstanding last year. All Saints Catholic college, another outstanding school, piloted two non-compulsory extended school days for year 7 and year 8 pupils. The summer term pilot saw a 12% drop in missed homework sanctions and a 16% increase in good behaviour.

Academies at the Inspiration Trust in East Anglia have also proved that the approach works. They extended their school days for children in year 7 to year 11, providing an extra 500 days of teaching, or 20 more weeks of learning. Inspiration Trust has also ensured that teacher meetings are more efficiently organised, and that professional development opportunities are available. The results speak for themselves: 66% of pupils at Inspiration Trust primaries meet the expected standard in reading, writing and maths, which is higher than the 62% England average; 50% achieve grade 5 or above in English and maths GCSEs, compared with 45.9% across all state-funded schools; and 83% of all A-level results were between A* and C last year.

Lengthening the school week creates the space for schools to decide how they can best use their time and improve outcomes. Many school reformers rightly believe that that can be done with strong discipline, a knowledge-rich curriculum and teacher-led instruction. That was the insight that shaped the Conservative education reform that made English children the best readers in the world and saw England rise through the programme for international student assessment rankings. However, education reform is never over; it is a constant fight to keep schools in good shape so that children can get the best education possible.

I congratulate the young people who made this debate happen, and I recognise the good faith of all those who support the proposal. However, it is the position of my party, like that of the Government and the Liberal Democrats—the boring grown-ups that we are—that a shorter school week would weaken our schools and end up letting children down. Instead, we need to ensure that more time is spent at school and focus on giving every child the best chance to succeed in life.