Most schools say that learning comes first, and their timetables usually say something else. Assemblies are added at short notice, rehearsals take the last week of term, visitors are shown around during lessons, announcements come over the intercom in the middle of an explanation, and a class of twenty-five waits while three students arrive late and settle. Each of these is small and defensible on its own. Added together across a year they take a serious amount of teaching away from the students who need it most.
Treating learning time as sacred means deciding that lesson time is not available for anything else, and then holding to that decision when it is inconvenient. It is a leadership position before it is a teaching technique, because almost everything that interrupts a lesson is authorised by somebody other than the teacher standing in front of the class.
Find out how much time the school is actually losing
Schools rarely measure this, and the estimates that leaders carry in their heads tend to be low. The most detailed study available comes from a district of public schools in the United States, where researchers surveyed staff and observed more than sixty lessons directly. They found that a typical classroom was interrupted more than 2,000 times a year, and that the interruptions and the settling down that followed them cost between ten and twenty days of teaching per student. The administrators who authorised most of those interruptions consistently underestimated both how often they happened and how much damage they did.
The setting is not an international school, and the figures should not be quoted as though they were. What transfers is the method and the finding underneath it, which is that the loss is larger than leaders assume and that most of it originates inside the school. Any school can run its own version in a week. Ask teachers to record every interruption to their lessons for five days, and count what the school itself caused.
Close down the interruptions the school controls
Once the list exists, most of it turns out to be within the leadership team’s gift. The intercom can be restricted to emergencies and to fixed times before and after lessons, and messages to teachers can wait for a break. Visitors and tours can be scheduled where they do least damage, and prospective parents usually understand that being shown a school which protects its lessons is a good sign.
Late arrival is harder to solve, being the most common interruption in almost every school, and a consistent routine for latecomers solves it where exhortation does not. The calendar is harder still, because concerts, examinations, sports fixtures and celebrations all have a legitimate claim on the year. The test to apply is whether the loss of teaching has been counted before the event is agreed, and whether the same year groups carry the cost every time.
Most of what is lost traces back to decisions somebody made. An excursion is agreed in the middle of term, approved on its own merits by someone looking at one proposal with no sight of what the year group has already missed. In the weeks before examinations, rehearsals, events and visits carry on as usual at the point in the year when teaching is worth most. A visitor arrives unannounced and cannot be turned away, when the real question is whether the visit has to take a lesson at all.
The examination period is the one worth treating differently, because the value of a lesson is not the same in every week of the year. A fortnight before the examinations begin, the school can declare the timetable closed: no excursions, no assemblies during lessons, no rehearsals in teaching time, no tours, and no messages to classrooms that are not urgent. It works when it is published in advance as a fixed period rather than decided week by week, and when the leadership team is willing to refuse things during it. Two weeks where nothing is allowed to intrude is a modest commitment, and it lands at the point in the year when the teaching is worth the most.
One rule deals with the excursion and the examination weeks. Anything that takes students out of lessons is agreed at the start of term, against a record of what each year group has already lost, and a proposal that arrives later has to be argued against that record rather than on its own. The unexpected visitor needs a decision made in advance, so that the front desk is following a routine when the moment comes. Most visitors can be shown a school at work without a class stopping for them.
Protect the first five minutes and the last five
The two most vulnerable parts of a lesson are its beginning and its end. Interruptions cluster at the start and the close of the school day, and those are also the points at which a lesson is easiest to lose without anyone noticing. A class that takes eight minutes to start and finishes five minutes early has lost a fifth of its hour, and nothing in the lesson plan will record it.
What fixes this is routine, and enthusiasm will not do it. Students know what to do as they enter, the first task is on the board and needs no instruction, the register is taken while they work, and the closing minutes are used to check what has been understood instead of to pack away. None of this is new, and it is the difference between a timetabled hour and an hour of teaching.
Judge engagement by how many students are thinking
Lessons that look lively are not always lessons where much is learned. In a class of twenty-five, a discussion in which six confident students speak and the rest listen is a quiet lesson for the other nineteen. Group activities can hide the same problem, with one or two students doing the work while the others copy the outcome.
The question worth asking in any classroom is what proportion of students is thinking hard about the subject at this moment. Techniques that raise that proportion are the ones worth the time: asking a question to the whole class before naming who will answer, requiring every student to write a response before anyone speaks, and checking understanding across the room rather than accepting the first correct answer as evidence that everyone has followed.
Spend the protected time on the things that make the most difference
Protecting time only matters if the time is well used. In practice a small number of approaches repay the effort in most subjects and most year groups.
Teach new material in small steps with worked examples, because a demonstration of how an expert solves the problem teaches more than an instruction to attempt it. Check understanding often and across the whole class, so that a misconception is caught in the lesson rather than in the assessment. Build in regular retrieval of earlier material, since bringing knowledge back to mind is what fixes it. Give feedback that tells a student what to do next. And allow enough practice, including the unglamorous kind, because fluency in the basics is what frees attention for harder work later.
None of these approaches is expensive, and all of them require lesson time, which is the argument for protecting it.
Make it visible, or it will not last
A policy on interruptions will drift within a term unless somebody watches it. The measures are simple enough to keep: the number of interruptions recorded in a sample week each term, lateness to lessons by year group, and the teaching hours lost to calendar events, counted before the calendar is approved.
Leadership meetings are where the commitment is tested, because if lesson time is a real priority, decisions about the calendar and about who may enter a classroom will show up in the minutes with a reason attached, and some requests will have been refused. A year of minutes in which no event was ever declined on these grounds suggests the priority exists only on paper.
What this is not
Protecting learning time is not the same as adding more of it. A longer day spent the same way produces more of the same result, and it costs more to staff. Nor is it an argument against assemblies, productions, sport or the events that give a school its character, which are part of what parents are paying for and part of what makes a school worth attending.
The argument is narrower than that: every one of those claims on the timetable should be made deliberately, by someone who knows what it costs in teaching. Too many of them are currently made by default, because nobody was counting.
Read next
- School Meeting Minutes: How to Turn a Filing Requirement into Management Information. Where a commitment to lesson time shows up, or fails to.
- The School Dashboard: What an Owner Should See Every Month. The indicators an owner should be shown, including the academic ones.
- The 360-Degree School Review. How a combined education and financial review examines a school in depth.
- Vision and Mission Integrity. Testing whether a school’s stated purpose shows up in what it does.
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