Every few years, the grind of modern life inspires calls for a radical rethink. We have seen this most recently in Iceland, where the rollout of a 35-hour, four-day working week has shown signs of success, and more broadly with the conversation around remote working. For obvious reasons, these productivity experiments relate to adult working life. But what if children’s increasingly frantic lives were also given a rethink?
I write this under the strain of what feels like the most flat-out week of the year, in which the sheer volume of low-key demands – plays, choirs, nativities, secret Santas, whip rounds, costume days, not to mention the bizarre closure of so many after-school programmes aeons before school finishes – leaves families dragging themselves towards the finish line, gasping for air. This image isn’t, as it turns out, merely figurative. As I slog through the final days, I am so theatrically put-upon that every small gesture triggers involuntary noises – huffing, puffing, groaning, sighing, the occasional piercing shriek – something I have only become conscious of thanks to my children’s catchphrase of the season: “Stop struggling.”
The struggle is real. They seem fine, buoyed up by the prospect of Christmas, but it is hard for parents at this time of year not to wonder if there may not be a better way of doing things. I find myself thinking enviously of those cousins of mine who took their kids out of school to travel the world for two years on the basis that the experience would be more valuable than traditional learning. I don’t have the resources to do that, so instead I hover over words such as “holistic” and “flexi”, and all the other terms we reach for to launder an exhausted desire to do less. “I’m opting out” has become a useful phrase that dignifies what used to be called “can’t be arsed”. Ditto boundaries and comfort levels and the right to say no, all of which may get us some way further towards equilibrium.
These kinds of measures are personal, small-scale responses to feelings of being overwhelmed. But there is another approach where children’s schedules are concerned, which involves something called “flexi-schooling”, in which kids are neither fully home-schooled, nor in full-time attendance at school, but engage in a mixture of the two. Devised originally for children suffering or recovering from illness, flexi-schooling isn’t a legal right for children in the UK but is allowed at the discretion of headteachers. If permitted, you can homeschool your child for part of the week.
There are obvious downsides to this, as anyone whose memories of limited schooling during the pandemic cause them to twitch their limbs or experience rapid onset breathlessness can testify. Earlier this month Sir Martyn Oliver, the head of England’s schools inspectorate, Ofsted, raised concerns about flexi-schooling from a safeguarding perspective, since it makes record-keeping around absences and children who “go missing from education” harder. Ofsted’s annual report estimated that approximately 34,000 children were attending school on a flexi, part-time basis, for reasons that went unrecorded. Ideally, he said, flexi-schooling should be used only as a short-term measure rather than a long-term way to address behavioural needs.
All of this makes sense and, of course, for most parents who work, the prospect of increasing their children’s number of hours at home during the day is a nightmare, not a solution. The desire for a general lowering of pressure is real, however, which explains how often “Scandinavia” is cited in conversations around education, with its prioritisation of play and relaxed approach to the age at which kids learn to read (six to eight years old, almost two years later than UK and US models). The longer you are in the system, it seems, the less intrusion you want from the system at home. I used to be quite keen on the idea of homework, but now that my kids are enrolled at a more or less homework-free primary school all I can think is, quite right and thank God. Let them have these 10 years without hitting marks or making grades.
And while the answer to the craziness of the Christmas schedule isn’t a pivot to hybrid schooling, we should regularly remind ourselves not to treat our kids like tiny executives, slogging through their five-day week plus sports and music and drama and homework. Maybe one of these days, the gurus behind the Icelandic four-day week experiment or blockbuster books such as The 4-Hour Work Week might profitably turn their attention to the under-18s.
Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist
