Longer school day back in the news from @halfon4harlowMP and others....this is some work I did at Policy Exchange seven years ago on what a longer school day might look like - for when @trussliz was a DfE Minister and looking at this https://policyexchange.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/only-a-matter-of-time.pdf

Doing an extended school day can solve many issues - academic catch up, pastoral support, childcare for working families. But each one is a different model and the objectives aren't interchangeable

There is no automatic relationship between total instructional time+performance in core subjects – some countries w longer school days perform better than England in PISA, some do worse, and some w shorter days do better. The Q is about how to deliver effective use of this time

Somewhere between a third and a half of schools already offered, in 2014, some form of longer school day. The biggest constraint was real estate, and staffing time

Around 40% of all parents supported the idea when polled but a similar number were opposed. Parents much preferred the idea for secondary schools (51%) to primary schools (33%). There was a strong preference in favour of voluntarism

If what government wants is catch up, then that means a 'traditional' longer day w more academic lesson time. That means more teachers, and / or paying existing ones proportionally more. It's very expensive (we estimated hundreds of millions, if not billions, at scale).

I'm a big fan of it in principle - and it can work when delivered well and the whole school community - and local community - supports it. It could well be a systematic solution to catch up. But it is *not* to be done quickly, halfheartedly, in a slapdash way, or on the cheap.