A London high school has come up with a radical new solution to break teenagers’ reliance on their ever-present digital devices: a 12-hour day.
All Saints Catholic College is a government-funded school close to Notting Hill, an area in inner west London that’s perhaps best known for the huge annual street party called the Notting Hill Carnival. It’s also not far from another tourist mecca: Portobello Road.
The school is in a leafy square less than a mile from Grenfell Tower, the apartment building where 72 people died after a fire broke out in 2017. In just seven years, All Saints has gone from being one of the least popular schools in the city to one of the most oversubscribed in the country.
Headteacher Andrew O’Neil attributes the reversal to several radical initiatives. As we dip between a private organ lesson and a design and technology class printing keyrings with 3D printers, he explains the most recent change: a school day that runs from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
The 10-week trial has drawn the attention of UK media.
Smartphones have long been banned at All Saints, but the extended schooldays mean students are not going home at 3:30 p.m. to jump on TikTok or YouTube.
O’Neil is slightly exasperated by the media attention on the smartphone ban. He thinks it’s not so much about taking devices away — but about giving students something else to do with their time.
He says the pandemic fueled a disconnection between some students and the school — he sees smartphones as exacerbating the problems rather than causing them.
“We did this to rebuild the sense of belonging because of the apathy and the disjointedness and the singularity that we were seeing in terms of how kids were behaving post-pandemic,” O’Neil says.
“The thing they liked the most was the togetherness. You put kids together, eating or playing, and they just chat, take the mick out of each other, just do all the things that kids like to do — we’re just organizing it for them.”
Extended schooldays
The premise is the trial is relatively simple: a school day that runs from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Students opt into the program and are given breakfast and dinner at school. They do an hour of homework club from 3:30 p.m. to 4:30 p.m., followed by an activity such as pickleball, art class, or cooking before eating dinner with their peers.
The program costs families a flat fee of just £10 ($13) a week, regardless of how many days they participate.
Mia Benoit, 12, and fellow Year 7 student Zacariah Pinto are surprisingly upbeat about spending more time at school. They say eating breakfast and dinner with their classmates is “relaxing,” and the opportunity to get teachers to help with homework makes them feel less stressed.
“I really enjoyed it,” Benoit said. “We had a whole hour of being able to get our homework done, but then after that, we had another hour of getting to do sports or different activities.”
Benoit says the extended time away from her phone doesn’t bother her given her mother restricts usage anyway. “I’m not allowed to use it for more than two and a half hours, so I don’t really mind being without it.”
For Pinto, the extended day simply meant he was never going home to an empty house after school; instead he spent his afternoons playing with friends and making new ones.
The flexibility is also a plus, says Pinto, who skipped the longer days on Mondays to get home for piano lessons.
Helping an ‘Anxious Generation’
All Saints’ experiment with an extended school day comes as concern mounts about the impact of smartphones and social media on teenagers. The bestselling book “The Anxious Generation” by Jonathan Haidt added fuel to the fire by arguing that the rise of smartphones was linked with an uptick in mental illness.
The book (which made JPMorgan’s annual list of summer reads) advocates for a ban on social media for children under 16, and the need for phone-free schools.
US Surgeon-General Vivek Murthy also recently called for social media to carry cigarette-style warning labels to warn of the health risks. Writing in The New York Times, he said social media increased the risk that children would suffer anxiety and depression.
Zach Rausch, an associate research scientist at NYU-Stern School of Business and lead researcher for Haidt, called the All Saints trial a “phenomenal” example of the “collective action problem.”
“It’s giving kids childhood back in many ways,” he said. “It just speaks to the collective action problem is that these kids don’t necessarily want to be on their phone in their bedroom, but if that is what is happening and that’s where everyone is — that’s what you’re going to do.”
While the UK has no formal national rules, several schools including elite college Eton, have taken steps to reduce students’ smartphone usage.
Practical problems
Rausch added that while All Saints’ initiative was interesting, it could prove difficult to scale.
O’Neil says the school plans to bring back the extended day periodically, rather than on a permanent basis. Practical issues such as funding and the risks of sending kids home late on dark winter nights all need to be considered.
However, the extended school day program has produced some noteworthy results.
Rebecca Fuller, the deputy headteacher, said there was an overall 17% decrease in children not completing their homework and a 15% increase in positive behavior logs from those who participated in the scheme. Students who typically had the most negative logs before the extended school program saw the number fall by 60%.
Rausch said his research had shown that constant access to smartphones and social media only increases social inequality.
“There’s an idea that this is closing the digital divide by giving everybody a smartphone,” he said. “But in fact, what you’re doing is sending the kids who have the hardest time with emotional regulation or who don’t have the kind of support structures around them off to manage the time that they’re spending alone.”
“I worry that it’s really setting up a lot of kids for failure in a way that will only increase the divides that we see,” he added.
‘Transformative’ program
Jonathan Brenner, the stepfather of 12-year-old Helena, who took part in the trial, said he noticed a marked difference in his daughter during the program.
Before the longer days, Helena would spend two to three hours on her phone every evening.
“She hardly ever even spoke to her friends verbally on the phone — it’s all through digital messaging — which means that her phone was glued to her hand from the time she left school until about 8 on 9 p.m,” he said.
He added that she previously had trouble sleeping, which Brenner attributed to the amount of time Helena spent on her smartphone.
The extended days were like an “immediate transformation of our daily lives,” he said. “I think the fact that she wasn’t on her phone for such a long time helped to calm her down.”
Her circle of friends is now more secure, Brenner added: “I think she’s realized that her phone doesn’t mean her life. She’s even started eating with us around the table; she’s getting used to not being at home on time and is more interested in our conversations.”
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