Start school day at 11am to let students sleep in, says expert | Science | The Guardian
http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015 ... ents-sleep

What do you make of that? It'd be a hell of a change, though I can't really see how you'd make it work with parents... going to work.

My 18 year old daughter was starting work at 5 in the morning, which meant leaving the house at 4, she seemed to adapt to that quickly enough.

Now she is back at school and leaves the house at 7.

Students will always arrive late and unrested. 11am starts will only mean they go to bed that much later.

No one else think it's sensible for them to start their day at a similar time to what will likely be required by a future employer?

True, IMO.


Well, school/university is not simply 'training the child to become a useful worker drone'. Obviously being able to keep to a routine and basic time management are useful life skills but that routine doesn't have to be '9-5 because people work 9-5', especially given people are increasingly not working 9-5 any more.

Pathetic

Quiet day and the Gruadain?

Not a bad idea but it would need to be taken in the context of wider discussion about when work starts as well.
There are strong arguments for staggering the times when people start working during the day to do things like reduce congestion but as the world is basically hooked on the 9 to 5 or variations thereof nobody wants to step out of line. Staggered starts could actually be beneficial for companies that cover customers in multiple time zones.

I have no great confidence anything will change. School is increasingly about squeezing out mindless drones for the meat grinder rather than providing an actual education. Bah.

I did 10- 7 or 7.30 til 4 for long enough. not all employers are that lenient.

I don't think students need encouraging in staying up all night.

Is there a meme I missed? Do people really have that much trouble spelling The Guardian?

I know it was intentional on your part, Caz, I just see it a lot and I'm curious.

The problem is that the circadian rhythms of your average pubescent teenager are often wildly divergent from those of the rest of us. There is something about puberty that not only increases the amount of sleep needed but also starts the sleep cycle later. Consequently, many teenagers are simply not able to learn properly until mid- to late morning.

If one takes the laughably naive stance that school is neither an indoctrination centre nor a holding pattern for inconvenient progeny but rather that children are in school in order to learn something, it would seem to me that it makes more sense to have them in school at the time of day when they are most able to learn.

It's a known joke due to the amount of typos in the paper. It was not originated by me.

Perhaps not, but working people overwhelmingly still follow routine and most have to "be there" by a set time not governed by how well they've shaken the sleep from their eyes.

What does this do the flexibility of working parents? Suddenly not being able to drop the kids at school on the way to work, will create more problems than it will solve. The possible suggestion that they should also be allowed to start later and finish later won't fly in many cases either - it'll all but destroy part-time working for many parents - crucial additional income.

I'm liking the idea of uni kids being dropped off by their parents every day lol

The article suggests normal times for primary school but 10-11am for teens.

While true, what do you do with the kids between 07:30 and 11:00, when you are working or commuting?

The question isn't so much about differing rhythms, I've been through that with my youngest stepdaughter. But most employers expect you to be in the office between 08:00 and 17:00.

As to the question above of staggered work times, we do that here, we found about 50% of our out of hours calls came between 07:00 and 08:00 and 17:00 to 18:30, so we put the support on a shift system, so that one comes in early, the bulk work the "normal" hours and then another does lates - we offer 24 hour support, with 1 person being on call, they now get far fewer out of hours calls to deal with.

But for a lot of the work, you need colleagues around, so that you can ask questions, meet up and discuss problems or projects etc. Likewise, a lot of jobs, like construction, you need all of the workers there at the same time, or at least the shift need to all clock on and clock off at the same time, because they are a team. You can vary those work times a bit, but then everybody has to adapt, not one or two. You also have to take into account the regulations for making noise - no construction noise before 07:00, no noise between 13:00 and 15:00 and no noise after 21:00, for example.

Bollocks.

If you need time to wake up, get up earlier.
If you need more sleep to do that, go to bed earlier.

Our school had more lessons in the morning than in the afternoon. The theory being that after lunch people were just waiting to go home and didn't try as hard. They were about right in my opinion.