By Howard White, CEO
I spent close on a year working in an electronics factory outside Norwich. During my time there, the factory moved to 24-hour work day, with three eight-hour shifts. Most factories use this model. Having invested huge amounts in buildings and machinery, it makes little sense to leave them empty and idle for 16 hours of the day.
But the public sector does precisely that. I don’t mean government offices. (Though it is true that it may make sense to offer public-facing services at hours and days when the public can actually use them.) I mean schools. Schools are only in full use for six to seven hours each day. And they are entirely closed for large chunks of the year.
Can do better
During Covid-19 everyone is saying, “things will never go back to the way they were”. But – as we see with the re-opening of schools in England this week – that is precisely what is planned. It needn’t be that way. There are opportunities for evidence-based ways to change how education is delivered, whilst at the same time making better use of school buildings around the country for much of the day and a lot of the year.
Let’s us look at the day first. My own 14-year-old daughter, Laila, has taken to lockdown education with great enthusiasm. She gets up at around 11 a.m., rather than a little after 6 a.m. on a regular school day, has a leisurely breakfast, but then gets down to eight hours or so of solid work. Her work pattern illustrates the findings from the Campbell review on school start times. Later school start times are good for teenagers. Not only do they sleep more, but their academic and psychosocial outcomes improve. This is evidence in favour of double-shifting.
Double-shifting introduces shifts into the school system. Basically, some children go to school in the morning and some go in the afternoon. Double-shifting is already used in developing countries, where lack of school buildings has been a constraint on increasing the number of children in school. Introducing double-shifting in schools would make better use of the available infrastructure, allow for fewer children to be in school at any one time to facilitate social distancing, and improve educational outcomes for the teenagers who should be scheduled for the afternoon shift. It also makes sense for parents who have organised their schedules around younger children who need be met or taken to and from school.
Follow the evidence from systematic reviews
Then there are those empty buildings during the long summer months. Some states in the US have experimented with year-round education. That is, shorter terms and more, but shorter, breaks. Year-round education is not all-year education for the students or their teachers, but it is for the schools. And the Campbell review of year-round education shows it leads to modest improvements in learning outcomes.
What I have not mentioned is class size. Social distancing requirements may result in smaller class sizes. There is a strong lobby for the benefits of small class sizes for students. And the evidence does indeed show that children learn more in smaller classes: Small class sizes for improving student achievement. But not that much. And it is expensive, so it would be more cost-effective to deploy those resources in other ways, to improve learning outcomes.
However, if in today’s changed circumstances smaller classes are unavoidable, it is good to know that it is indeed a good thing. It is anyway clear that educations is going to cost more: double-shifting, all-year education and smaller classes all need more teachers to make it happen. Moving to more online education may save costs, but there is no evidence for such approaches with school-aged children, and anyway is not an option for younger children.
More teachers, please
So, for now, policymakers planning the medium-term Covid-19 response should be planning on getting more teachers into the classroom. I can think of two ways to do this.
First, get some in quickly using both volunteers and a Teach for America model of training graduates to do a few years as a school teacher (a similar model has been adopted by Teach for India). The Campbell review of volunteer tutoring programmes shows that they have substantial benefits for the learning outcomes of young students. The systematic review of Teach for America shows that learning outcomes for students taught under the programme are at least as good as those for children taught by regular teachers – though the review authors do warn to treat the results with caution as more and better studies are needed.
Secondly, train more teachers. Using the approaches described above will give some breathing room to expand regular teacher training capacity, to have more trained teachers entering the system as the first batches of Teach for [insert your country name here] graduates are leaving.
Seize the day
Things will go back to the way they were unless we plan otherwise. Covid-19 provides an opportunity to rethink and reshape how we do things. Let’s do that in an evidence-based way which makes the world, post-Covid-19, a better world.
The Campbell Collaboration: Better evidence for a better world
The Campbell Collaboration is an international social science research network that produces high quality, open and policy-relevant evidence syntheses including systematic reviews, evidence and gap maps, plain language summaries and policy briefs.