Energy crisis: Scottish schools 'may have to switch to three-day week'

There is already an ongoing debate about introducing a four-day week as a way of tackling teacher exhaustion and burnout in the wake of Covid-19.

Prof Selwyn said a range of additional economic and environmental factors – from soaring energy bills to the effects of increasingly extreme weather - had added impetus to the discussion. But he stressed any restructure would require enhanced digital learning capabilities.

His remarks come after reports that schools south of the Border are looking at introducing a three-day week during the autumn months as utility and energy costs surge by as much as 300 per cent.

The chief executive of a leading academy trust was quoted as saying that shorter days, fewer clubs and “draconian” restrictions on energy usage are expected. Another headteacher described the future as “exceptionally bleak”.

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Prof Selwyn said pressures were being felt with acuteness in England due to the specific features of its education system. However, he added that the underlying issues were equally relevant to Scotland.

“We’ve had ten years of austerity in many countries,” he told The Herald. “We’ve had 20 years of running schools like businesses.

“It’s interesting that the first schools to start raising energy costs as a problem are the academies [in England]. If you start running schools along business-like lines, they’re the ones that start moaning about energy costs. You’ve got shareholders to look after and if you start running schools on profit baselines, this is what happens.

“I think we have to entertain [something like a three-day school week] as a possibility, if not a probability. I’d love to think it would never happen in my lifetime. But that’s thinking about schools from a very late-20th century point of view. We’ve already got the situation where in, say, Texas, they’re starting to move to a four-day week in certain districts because of teacher bills, pay and wage costs.”

Amid warnings that energy prices could lead to swingeing council cuts, Prof Selwyn said the role of local authorities in managing Scottish schools would create its own risks. Education leaders here are already mired in a protracted dispute with unions, which are threatening industrial action ballots over a revised 3.5 per cent pay offer that has been branded “derisory”.

Professor Neil Selwyn said moves to restructure school time were already happening in certain parts of the world.

Prof Selwyn said: “Local authorities will be feeling the pressure everywhere, because as I said, it’s not just schools that are facing a crisis in terms of the cost of energy and so on. If you’re responsible for libraries, museums, and other things, you can see the burden is going to be a triple whammy.”

He argued that there were various ways in which learning and teaching time could be restructured, pointing to two-track schools in the United States where half the pupils come in during the morning and half in the afternoon.

“The big burden is the fact that you’re individualising the problem or outsourcing the problem to parents,” he added. “If you’ve got this energy crisis in Scotland and this kind of fuel poverty crisis, but you’re outsourcing the cost of heating, of power, of resourcing, to parents, who then have to arrange to have some form of childcare, and it keeps chopping and changing, that’s going to be a huge problem.

“You need some kind of routine - three days a week on, two days a week off – that is the same throughout the year.”

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Prof Selwyn also said consideration would have to be given to maximised, five-day provision for deprived or vulnerable pupils who rely on school for safety, stability and, in many cases, hot food. “As a socially concerned, socially progressive country, you have to pay attention to that,” he added.

According to Prof Selwyn, Scotland is well placed to introduce the necessary policy changes and infrastructure as cost pressures mount and weather-linked disruption becomes more frequent. He said: “If we are going to contemplate flicking over to any form of digital, we really need to develop a high quality, educationally beneficial form of online learning that’s made available on a national basis.”

Explaining that this could include the creation of an Open Universitystyle “Open School”, he added: “Scotland actually leads the way in e-learning - in being much more innovative and progressive about thinking about e-learning, particularly in higher education. There are lots of centres of excellence for e-learning that you could easily draw upon, which would be fantastic. But all of it takes time and effort.”