A TIME TO LEARN

If you were designing schools for twenty first century Britain you wouldn't start here.

With working parents trying to juggle child care with a working week, you wouldn't design schools to start at nine, the very time for which parents are struggling to get to work. And you wouldn't design them to finish at three thirty or four - a time which also impinges on the working day. Additionally, you wouldn't then compound the error of a shortened school day by setting homework and initiating for many a lifelong blurring of work and leisure time.

And you wouldn't design them with seven or so weeks holiday in the summer. Nor with set time holidays at other times in the year which create scheduling and cost problems for everyone.

No, you'd design them to fit with the needs of modern Britain. Everyone knows that other educational systems, especially in the developing world, have this timekeeping aspect much more right than we do, and that their kids are working longer, learning more, ready to claim their competitive place in the new world economy.

Whilst we are complacently bungling along in a nineteenth century model, simply because we daren't face the challenging labour relations issues of changing it.