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Later School Start For Teenagers Brings Drop In Absenteeism
krou writes "Monkseaton High School in North Tyneside, UK, began an experiment in October that saw its 800 pupils ranging in age from 13-19 attend school an hour later than normal, at 10am. Early results indicate that 'general absence has dropped by 8% and persistent absenteeism by 27%.' Head teacher Paul Kelley supported the idea because he believed that 'it was now medically established that it was better for teenagers to start their school day later in terms of their mental and physical health and how they learn better in the afternoon', and he now claims that the children are becoming 'happier better educated teenagers' as a result of the experiment. The experiment is being overseen by Oxford neuroscience professor Russell Foster. 'He performed memory tests on pupils at the school which suggested the more difficult lessons should take place in the afternoon. He said young people's body clocks may shift as they reach their teenage years — meaning they want to get up later not because they are lazy but because they are biologically programmed to do.'"
Teens starting school later? Who's going to supervise the teen until they get to school? Won't somebody think of the parents?
I never used to kick into gear until about 11 am as a schoolkid. Even at university this didn't happen. I was just never a morning person.
Now that I'm a working stiff, I get up at 6am every morning, but *believe* me, I'd prefer to mosey on in to work at 10 am and work later.
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Maybe instead of training them for a life of drudgery, we could let kids be kids.
What is the reality of the "real world"? There are shifts at all hours of the day. Making everything 9-5, 8-4, etcetera doesn't even make sense traffic wise. And how will work-from-home affect things?
Now, I can agree that many kids will eventually work office jobs, but hardly all of them. And shouldn't the school day be structured in the way best times for them? I mean, it is said schools were once structured around the realities of factory life, things like hearing a period bell and shuffling to the next station and what not - but is the reality for most adults factory work anymore either?
The real-world changes. Often times because of a new generation with different ways of thinking.
Schools should be structured to teach effectively. Not to emulate the current workplace in superficial ways for no real good reason.
High school is not supposed to be exactly like the real (employment) world. It is supposed to teach children stuff like mathematics and grammar. If this can be done better by starting lessons an hour later and shifting the more difficult subjects to the afternoon to accomodate (what appears to be) biological facts - then great.
Having teachers, specific schedules en sitting together with 30 of your peers is not exactly like the real world either.
Quantum tots
He said young people's body clocks may shift as they reach their teenage years — meaning they want to get up later not because they are lazy but because they are biologically programmed to do
I believe they start to sleep very late and thus need to wake up late, otherwise memory and concentration fail.
I've noticed such a shift with myself, when I started to go bed around midnight or 2am. Suddenly I was much less efficient at work in the morning but rather good around 5pm. No biological change. Just stupid habits.
At Wellington High School, they have been starting the seniors about an hour later for the last few years. It seems to work well, and the students are happier for it.
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If 10am is the new 9am then 1am is the new midnight. Give them some time to adapt and they'll still be late for school
I don't understand. Time is that totally arbitrary number we put out, and change twice yearly, as arbitrarily. Basically, make yoiur clocks run 1 hour early. You'll feel soooo much better, if you believe what the say.
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I bet this is just the Hawthorne Effect. I bet that if they had another school and told them that they were going to start an hour earlier, as they believed that this would allow pupils to get the work done and have more free time in the evenings, this school would also have shown an improvement.
Everyone is different. You cannot paint all people with such a broad brush. There are always morning people. When I was in High School, I was up at 4AM every day (and still am) to do my homework and/or study for tests.
For me, mornings were for learning, and afternoons were for doing. My brain has always worked that way. A late school day would have been horrible for me.
The whole point is that as they are currently teenagers, they perform better when classes start later. The research does not apply to adults. So, now that they are teenagers, have school later, and when they graduate from college, they will be ready for earlier start times.
10 am sounds really late to me. My school started at 7:30, which meant that the bus picked us up at 7 am. That felt like 4 years of punishment. The reason for the early start time was all the afternoon activities. School got out at 2:30; at that point it was sports (swimming for me) or various clubs, until 4:30 or 5. How on earth can you have any sort of sports when school starts at 10 am?
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Isn't afternoon relative? Won't teenagers just stay up an hour later until eventually they have the same problems with 10 am as they do with 9 am now?
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Yeah, the school bus really wastes time-out-of-your-life, especially if you're one of the first stops. It doesn't even really save that much on fuel, because of the way the routes are planned, the many stops and acceleration, and the sheer bulk of the thing. We really need a better option for places where walking doesn't work for whatever reason.
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Thomas Edison has a lot to answer for (at least for adult sleep patterns).
Electric lighting may have given massive boosts to human productivity. However, if it wasn't for electric light, we would all be going to bed much sooner (as you can't do any real work by candlelight), and then waking up in the morning with the natural daylight. Anyone who has spent time wild camping has experienced this..... and also knows how much more refreshed they feel waking up to the wavelengths inherent to natural light.
Of course, those that live above/below certain latitudes might argue differently when winter comes along and there is no daylight in which to do any work. You can only spend so much time in bed
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Here's a nice BBC documentary called "The secret life of your bodyclock" about this effect. Including a piece very similar to this specific case. It can be viewed @ http://www.documentary-log.com/d379-secret-life-of-your-body-clock/
It's not "turn up when you like", it's just been moved an hour back. It probably also means working for an hour later. I know I find it much easier to get up when there is actual daylight. Over here school and university are usually from autumn to spring with a break over summer, meaning that for a lot of the year it's dark when I get up (and over winter it's even dark again when it's time go home..).
which is totally what she said
Come on, this is the UK we're talking about here. Junior Assistant to the Deputy Permanent Undersecretary for Traffic Cones (North East Region) is about the peak of realistic ambition.
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These kids need to get over it. I'm only 6 years removed from high school now, but back then 1st period started at 7:10am and I'm pretty sure that hasn't changed since I graduated. And TFA is talking about 10am? Wow.
Guess what? If you move the start time back an hour or two, the kids will just start to take up an hour or two later. Nothing will change. I didn't RTFA, but I can almost guarantee that if they left this "start later" system in place long enough, they'd see absenteeism rise back to 'normal' levels anyways.
I don't know... my experience has been that it's all a feedback loop. Sure, sleeping one hour later is going to make you happier for a month or a trimester or a year, but then you just become used to going to bed one hour later, and the cycle repeats. Now instead of going to bed at 10 PM and maybe pushing it to 11 PM now and then, the normal go to bed hour becomes 11 PM and you start pushing towards midnight on those days when you think "nah, one less hour of sleep won't kill me." Except eventually it accumulates and now you'd be happy to have one _more_ hour.
I remember reading about a study waay back, where some people were put in a house with no windows and no time to tell the time. It turned out that the natural cycle for humans is 26 hour days. Makes sense from a design stand point too. It's easier to have a margin of error as a longer cycle and reset it each day, than to try to prolong one which due to genetic variations is too short for a day. We're pretty much by design prone to shift forward over time, in the absence of that forcing it to reset at the same time. So basically you shifted one hour forward, now what? You've just created the setup to want to shift one more hour later. Then what?
Plus, think of it this way. The best hour they wake up is based on when they go to sleep, which in turn depends on other factors like what's on TV or whether their guild mates are still in a WoW raid or just if some friend is still awake and reachable by phone. Sure, if we could shift just one group of kids one hour forwards while all those factors stay the same, yeah, it should work. But if we actually shifted every single teenager an hour forward, then TV programs which have them as a target audience would start shifting one hour forward too. Because that's the nature of the free market. You don't pack your wares and leave while it's still prime time for your customers. Their friends too have been shifted one hour forward, and can plan those raids to end one hour later. Your friends are available on the phone one hour later. Etc.
The feedback loop is pretty much built in.
All those factors anchoring the bed time just shifted forward too. Soon we're back to square one: kids who hadn't had enough sleep, being barely fit to go to school at the new starting time. Soon you'll need another hour shift to get the same results as in TFA. And in a few months another. What then? Eventually end up with school shifted forward all the way to starting at 1 AM? Then what?
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Man, back in the good old days, when kids were ten, they went into the mills and the mines. Or on the ships. They were the ones that lit the fuses and ran because they were the smallest. They helped bring back lunch and stuff and they learned how to grow up to be real and hardy men. Now look at us.
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Actually, I've worked several jobs where working life did run to that timetable, so that people didn't get caught up in the morning rush caused by every job insisting that you should be sitting at your desk by 9am for no particular reason. It led to people not being exhausted by the time they got into the office because they'd been force to stand on the train with their head in somebody's armpit.
And that's through 5 feet of snow while being chased by wolves.
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The simple solution is to just make your kids go to bed earlier. The same irresponsible parents that let their high schoolers stay up too late will likely let them stay up even later after the school schedule is adjusted. The study has some merit, but I doubt that the trends for this school will hold. I suspect the drop in absenteeism is only temporary, and that the rate will go back up in a few short years.
As a former baystater, I can attest to the idiocy that the puritan legacy has played on that state. However, I don't see that this has anything to do with the puritans. AFAIK, the current schedule for schools was worked out based on what was cheapest for communities to pay for. Students start at approximately 9:30, 8:30 or 7:30 depending on their grade level (Elementary, Middle, or High School) so that older children will get out befor the younger, thus providing supervision until the parents get out of work, and so that the school only needs to buy enough busses for 1/3 of the total student population in the town.
I think a big part of the problems I've seen with the Massachusetts education system is the use of new "Progressive Education" techniques pioneered in the 60's, shown to be largely counter productive by the late 70's, but still en vogue in the late 90's (when I graduated HS). They care far too much about self esteem and student's feelings, and far to little for making the students perform. I believe that I did well in spite of many of my teachers instead of because of their efforts. Only a handful of my teachers actually challenged me, and that's because they didn't accept excuses or care too much about how a 'C' or a 'D' made me feel. Those rare grades made me feel bad, but they also motivated me to improve my performance (and not because I was getting paid for A's as many of my peers were).
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Why is this an issue in a global connected world, with different timezones and artificial light? The tendency of "Millenials" would be that they accept more flexibility in work, yet fit it into their lifestyle and are allowed to shift their hours around. (teleworking, catching up hours after 5, some even come in at 7 to be able to leave at 3)...
I walk in at work between 10 and 11am. My clients know that if they book me earlier I'll show up, but am useless all day. It's something I wished wasn't so, but simply "sleeping earlier" just throws me off balance or I'm laying awake in bed.
My schooltime was hell because of this; I dragged myself through classes but was more trying to stay awake as being able to pay attention... Just one hour more in bed would've been a world of difference to me and I would not have the perception of suffering through it and fighting each morning with myself to get up and through the day to stay awake.
For some reason, my biorithm is delayed compared to the "general population"; I get productive and creative in the afternoon and have it peak around midnight to wind down and end up going to sleep around 3-4am. Before noon, I'm waking up and useless, it's when I generally follow up on email but don't get anything significant done.
I do identify with the problems described as delayed sleep phase syndrome
So again, I cope well, I get my work done and get praised. You can't be creative or brilliant in just a certain timeslice, it's about getting your work done. Nobody cares when; you have to wait for Singapore to wake up to start working to get your issues resolved, the US to wake up to go through your communication and get a reply... I have my 8 hours a day (and more) I'm comitted to my clients, but never 9-5.
I think we can keep recursing like this until someone returns 1
I graduated 2nd in my class, and went on to one of the top 10 engineering schools in the country. And I got up every morning on time. The trick? Eat breakfast - and I don't mean a coffee or a Snickers. Parents, feed your damn kids a real meal.
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We used to run this way. Most of the programmers would come in about 11AM, work until 4 or 5 at the office. Usually if we needed to have a meeting or they needed something from one of the other people, it worked out well to have everyone in the same place. Then they'd go home and usually work again from 10PM - 2AM or so from home. Sometimes they'd come back to the office (all had 24 hours access cards). We were able to run like this for about the first year to 18 months until the product started shipping. And the bulk of our clients were small retail outlets that started about 8AM local time and ended about 5PM local time. Typically, we'd field more tech support calls right at 8AM than any other time of the day. So we had to be there because often times it really was a show stopping problem for the client.
We tried setting up an office system that would forward calls to cell phones, but half the time he employees wouldn't pick up. Either the phone was off, in another room, battery dead, or they simply slept through it. In the end we had to make sure at least two people were scheduled at 8AM whether they liked it or now.
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The school bus is a brand of semi-necessary evil. The system was forced to provide an option so that a parent who couldn't take their kids to school didn't wreck the kids' education.
The savings are not about fuel, they're about *saving parental time/money*. Say 15 kids on a route * 20 min parental time saved each way *2 times per day - 600 min aka 10 hours total parental time saved/day. Because of staggered distances, parent returns home, etc etc, prob as high as 15 Parental hours per day per route.
At 12 bus routes per day * # days/year, that adds up!
You're right about the first kid on the stop getting wrecked. And I assumed a "rich" system with only 15 stops per route! When a school struggles they cut bus routes, and some systems have as many as 30 stops on a route.
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No, high school is a prison for teenagers. All that stuff with textbooks is window dressing.
'it was now medically established that it was better for teenagers to start their school day later in terms of their mental and physical health and how they learn better in the afternoon'
ITYM 'socially' not 'medically'. Teenagers are not biologically predisposed to staying up late and getting up late, otherwise they would have been doing this in the 1800s. We don't evolve fast enough to have gone from creatures that go to sleep and rise with the sun to creatures who go to sleep at 1 and wake up at noon and then miraculously at the age of 22 suddenly change to creatures that go to bed at reasonable hours and wake up at reasonable hours. It is all just social custom.
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