teens and sleep

Teachers stand up against 'lie-in' plan for teenagers

• Pupils should be in bed on time, says teaching union
• School leaders: 'We don't need more changes'

• Jessica Shepherd
• guardian.co.uk, Monday 9 March 2009 13.47 GMT

Headteachers have poured scorn today on the suggestion that all secondary schools give teenagers an extra two hours in bed by starting classes at 11am.
Paul Kelley, the head of Monkseaton community high school in north Tyneside, wants to introduce a timetable where lessons begin at "about 11am" from September.
The head, who is known for his groundbreaking teaching methods, including exercise sessions between short bursts of teaching, has followed the research on teenagers' daily rhythms by Russell Foster, a professor of neuroscience at Oxford University.
Foster's experiments on teenagers, including 200 at the Monkseaton school, show teenagers' brains work better in the afternoon. Foster argues that from the age of 10, body clocks shift by two hours on average.
Kelley's school hit national headlines for its "spaced learning" techniques which enabled pupils to do well in a GCSE module after only 60 minutes of learning.
Today he said: "Teenagers aren't lazy. We're depriving them of the sleep they need through purely biological factors beyond their control. This has a negative impact on their learning and possibly on their mental and physical health. We've just learnt this, but it is vital that we act on it."
But headteachers rubbished the claim that teenagers worked best in the afternoon.
John Dunford, the general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said his experience had shown the opposite was true. "Anyway, there are enough changes in education at the moment without this self-inflicted experiment catching on," he said.
John Bangs, the head of education at the National Union of Teachers, said it was up to parents to make sure children went to bed at a "reasonable time".
"It's about parents and schools working together to establish a bit more discipline," he said. "It is totally inappropriate for teenagers to get into a pattern of getting up for classes at 11am. Workplaces and colleges demand a regular day."
Bangs said starting lessons at 11am would force teachers to work later and compromise their work-life balance.
He said: "I don't think we should be giving in to the argument that somehow youngsters stay up until God knows when."
Roisin Maguire, the headteacher of St Joseph's college, a grammar school in Stoke-on-Trent, said her pupils "slowed down" as the day progressed.
Maguire said she was changing the school timetable to start and finish earlier in September to reflect the results of tests on pupils which found they worked best in the morning.
Lessons at St Joseph's will begin at 8.45am, rather than 9.05am, and there will be only one hour of classes after lunch, rather than two.
Kelley said headteachers who disagreed with him "were not to be blamed for not knowing the research that had gone on".
He said: "It is not that teachers are being mean, they are just assuming that their body clocks are the same as teenagers'."
He said he had spoken to schools in Kansas and Missouri in the US who were interested in changing their timetables in accordance with the research.
A spokeswoman from the Department of Children, Schools and Families said there were no plans to make any changes to the school timetable. "Timetables are a matter for schools and headteachers," she said.