Warning, highly sensitive subject. “We must reopen a debate which is that of school time during the year, one of the other great French hypocrisies,” declared Emmanuel Macron on June 27, during a trip to Marseille. Since then, the President of the Republic has reaffirmed this desire on several occasions, during his recent and numerous interventions on the school site, which has been made a priority for the five-year term. Among the avenues put forward: allowing students with the greatest academic difficulties to return to school earlier to help them catch up, reducing the time of so-called “intercalary” school holidays (All Saints’ Day, Christmas and winter periods). and spring) and better distribute course hours over the year to avoid having days that are too long… The analysis of certain scientific studies, field surveys and various experiments allows us to better understand the issues and the interest to put this issue back on the top of the priority pile.
The project which would consist of reducing the duration of the summer holidays is the one which has provoked the most reactions, provoking in particular the anger of the teaching unions for whom this measure would be ineffective or, at least, would not be sufficient to reduce inequalities between students. What the studies demonstrate with certainty is that the differences in level do indeed widen in the months of July and August between children enrolled in the priority education network (REP) and the others. A study by the Department of Foresight and Performance Evaluation (Depp), dated April 2023, confirmed this again recently. “In CP, during the school year, the performance gaps between schooling sectors are reduced. Then, during the summer holidays, students are away from school for two months. At the end of this period of leave, performance gaps increase”, writes this service of the Ministry of National Education which is based on a cohort of students who entered CP in 2020. The phenomenon is particularly obvious in mathematics, and in particular with regard to resolutions problems, subtraction or number line exercises. It is less so in French, but REP + students nevertheless tend to struggle more with understanding sentences read by the teacher when they return in September than their classmates.
However, reconsidering the duration of the summer cut does not seem to be a priority for many experts and scientists. The emergency according to them? Instead, tackle “small” vacations. “France is the only country in the world to have adopted this organization of four times two weeks of vacation. Which is heresy for me since it totally desynchronizes the children. We know well today that students take several days to recover from this long break and get back into school time”, says psychologist Claire Leconte, specialist in the rhythms of children and adolescents. Several chronobiology studies prove it and many are not new. Since the 1950s, researchers have carried out “timeless” experiments by isolating young adults in caves for several weeks, without a watch, alarm clock, radio, or any other element allowing them to find their way. “They alone were the regulators of their internal clock. This is how we managed to prove that it took two weeks for the body to settle into its natural rhythm commonly called ‘circadian’ rhythm”, explains Claire Leconte. In the course of her work, she has heard many teachers tell her that they have difficulty getting students’ attention the first few days after the holidays. “A great classic!”, she says.
“The key to good sleep is indeed regularity,” continues Sandrine Plancoulaine, public health doctor and sleep specialist. “This is why we recommend that children, like adults, go to bed and get up at regular times, including during weekends and vacations,” explains this doctor in genetic epidemiology. Reducing the duration of short vacations would, again, make it easier to move towards this rule. Like her, many sleep specialists also lean towards the 4.5 day week which would allow students to work every morning of the week and no longer encounter this “break” on Wednesday. This is far from being the case today since approximately 90% of schools have adopted the four-day week. For Stéphanie Mazza, professor of neuropsychology at the University of Lyon 1, reducing the duration of short vacations and returning to school on Wednesday morning would also have the advantage of “distributing class hours differently and having less cognitively heavy days”. “But be careful,” she warns, “this is only interesting if we take the opportunity to get students to do more physical activity or go on outings.”
Take into account the biological clock of adolescents
Although we have a lot of precise data on sleep, the impact of the 4.5 day week on learning has not been scientifically evaluated. But according to Claire Leconte, a return to classes on Wednesday morning could be profitable: “In France, with the four-day week, students only have 140 days in the year to receive all the learning… compared to 180 to 200 days in other countries. The fact that the courses are so condensed inevitably has a negative influence on learning”. This specialist began to carry out experiments in the early 1980s, but the most convincing, according to her, was the one carried out in a school group in Lille, in a very disadvantaged neighborhood, between 1996 and 2008. “The fact that the students had benefited from 6 half-mornings of lessons, from Monday to Saturday, during these twelve years, considerably modified their results. This was notably possible to measure thanks to national evaluations”, she insists. Having more time will have made it possible to set up “discovery trails” allowing these children to visit museums and learn about kayaking or computers.
Another area of research has also tended to develop in recent years: that devoted to the study of sleep in adolescents. What does this have to do with adapting school times? It is now scientifically proven that delaying the start time of classes in middle or high school would have an impact on students’ academic results. Simply because teenagers are not made for going to bed and getting up early. And it is not necessarily a question of will! “This observation is explained, among other things, by the evolution of the biological clock which, at the time of puberty, shifts into the evening,” explains Stéphanie Mazza, member of the Scientific Council of National Education.
On March 23, 2022, it organized an international conference “Sleep better for better learning” to which American researcher Lisa Meltzer was invited. The speaker mentioned the experiment carried out between 2017 and 2019 in a school district in Colorado: shifting the start of classes by 40 minutes to 1 hour 10 minutes had a positive impact not only on the level of adolescents, but also on attention skills, well-being and the fight against absenteeism. In France, no experimentation has been carried out so far. “But we are currently putting one in place in a boarding school”, in Sourdun, in Seine-et-Marne, reveals Stéphanie Mazza. A new subject which the Head of State has not yet taken up but which could soon be put forward.