Extra hour a week found to have modest benefits

A new report has been published by the Education Policy Institute which finds a modest positive association between the time pupils spend in school each week and academic attainment in England.

The research, funded by the Law Family Educational Trust, finds that the majority of schools are meeting the previous government’s expectation that schools should deliver a 32.5 hour week by September 2024. 

It also explores, for the first time in England, the relationship between time in school and attainment outcomes at the end of primary and secondary school.

The report finds that in 2023/24, four fifths of primary schools and three quarters of secondary schools had school weeks that were 32.5 hours or more, as per the previous government’s expectation for this term.  

It also found that free schools have longer school weeks than other types of school, as do academically selective secondary schools.

Schools rated ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted and those in London tend to have longer school weeks too. ‘Outstanding’ schools have school weeks that are between 10 and 20 minutes longer, and pupils attending secondary schools in London have over half an hour extra time in school a week, when compared to the typical school.

Additional time in school is associated with a small, yet positive, effect on overall attainment at the end of both primary and secondary school.  

An additional hour of weekly secondary school time is associated with a 0.17 grade improvement in one GCSE subject, and an additional hour of school a week in primary schools is associated with improvements in Key Stage 2 scaled scores of 0.053 and 0.066 for maths and reading, respectively.  

At secondary, an additional hour has a substantially larger association with attainment in language subjects: An additional hour of school a week at secondary school is associated with a 0.063 grade improvement in language GCSEs, much larger than the estimated 0.018 grade improvement in English, 0.014 in maths, 0.016 in science, and 0.017 in humanities GCSEs. It is plausible this larger association with respect to languages is due to factors we cannot observe in the data, given the available measures of prior attainment and relatively low take-up of language subjects.

The report highlights that whilst increased time in school is found to be associated with small improvements in academic attainment, further consideration should be given to what activities take place in any extra time and to whether the additional cost of increasing school time could be better used on other interventions which are known to improve in attainment.