New report finds a positive link between time in school and academic attainment in England

A new report published today finds the majority of schools in England (four fifths of primary schools and three quarters of secondary schools) are delivering a school week that is 32.5 hours or more – meeting the expectation set by the previous government for all schools to be delivering by this term.

The Education Policy Institute’s (EPI) research, funded by the Law Family Educational Trust, uses new data on the length of the school week to examine how long pupils are spending in English schools.

The data showed that additional hours of schooling have a small positive effect on attainment at the end of primary and secondary school. In secondary schools, an additional hour of weekly school time is estimated to be associated with a 0.17 grade improvement in one GCSE subject.

This new report builds on a literature review published earlier in the year, which showed the importance of what was happening in any additional time in influencing any future attainment benefits.

Key findings showed 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.

Free schools have longer school weeks than other types of school. In 2023/24, free schools had on average almost an additional hour (primary) and over an hour (secondary) of school time per week compared with the average school. This is potential due to the greater flexibility free schools have over their school days.

Academically selective secondary schools have longer school weeks; on average, these schools have a week that is almost one hour longer than non-selective schools.

Schools rated ‘Outstanding’ by Ofsted and those in London tend to have longer school weeks; the weeks 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, according to the data.

Meanwhile, an additional hour of weekly secondary school time is associated with a 0.17 grade improvement in one GCSE subject.

The associations with English/reading test scores are slightly larger than for maths. Differences are small – 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.

EPI said it is plausible this larger association with respect to languages is due to factors that cannot be observed in the data, given the available measures of prior attainment and relatively low take-up of language subjects.

Today’s analysis follows a literature review EPI published earlier in the year, which found that the effects of increasing time in school are typically found to be modest in other country specific and cross-country studies. It showed the importance of what was happening in any additional time in influencing any future attainment benefits.

Louis Hodge, associate director for school system and performance at EPI, said: “These new findings show promising effects of extra time in school, which government and policymakers should build on.

“To maximise the benefits of extra time, further consideration should be given to what activities take place in this additional time.

“More broadly, given the constraints (cost and otherwise) on increasing time in school further, it is important to better understand which mix of activities during the school day deliver the best outcomes for pupils.”

Ian Hartwright, head of policy at school leaders’ union NAHT, said: “This report confirms that as we have long argued, most schools already open for at least 32.5 hours – and they did so before this guidance was first mooted.

“The small number of schools which do not already open for 32.5 hours are usually minutes rather than hours from reaching this threshold.

“There’s little evidence to suggest that adding five to 10 minutes to the school day is likely to bring much, if any benefit and this report does not consider the logistical challenges involved, such as increasing the hours of lunchtime supervisors and other support staff, and taking into account school bus times, especially in rural areas.

“We should be mindful that the gains identified in this particular piece of research are minimal, confirming that an extension of school hours is unlikely to be the ‘game-changer’ the previous government implied it could be. There are a whole range of alternative policy options that policy-makers should look at instead.”

In its 2022 white paper ‘Opportunity for all: strong schools with great teachers for your child’, the previous government proposed a minimum threshold of 32.5 weekly hours (6.5 hours per day on average) of school time for all state-funded mainstream schools.

The mechanisms put in place to ensure schools deliver the 32.5-hour week expectation include:

• Schools are now required to publish their total weekly hours on their websites
• Ofsted will start to monitor the length of school days as part of their inspections and, where relevant, require schools to justify not meeting the minimum expectation
• The Department for Education has now started collecting data on the total compulsory time pupils spend in school per week through the spring school census.