Longer school hours: School's not out SINCE the late 19th century the English secondary-school day has started around 9am and ended about seven hours later. Michael Gove, the education secretary, thinks that was fine when many children helped out in the fields, but it is hardly suited to an era of working mothers and a global race for educational attainment. He wants English state secondary schools to lengthen their hours and trim holidays - currently 13 weeks plus a week's worth of days for teacher training - to bring them more into line with high-performing places like Hong Kong and Singapore. Many of the new breed of independently run, state-funded academies favour a longer day, which often starts at 8.30am and ends at 5pm. Some have launched extra Saturday morning tuition, as well as homework clubs. In places, the traditional trimester system is being tweaked. The David Young Community Academy in Leeds dispenses with the long summer break and runs a seven-term year with short breaks between the terms. A desire to extend the teaching day is shared by countries fretting about how to improve their educational performance. Japan and Germany are both extending classroom time. But proving a sustained link between long school hours and better academic outcomes is tricky. Factors like strong parental motivation and more authoritarian societies probably help explain the excellent performance of many Asian schools as much as time spent in front of the interactive white board. Finland, which also excels in most education league tables, subjects children to fewer hours of teaching a day than any other country in the developed world, according to the OECD, a think-tank. It does, however, have unusually well-qualified teachers and co-operative unions. A study by Victor Lavy for the National Bureau of Economic Research in 2010, which tracked school hours against international comparisons from the OECD's PISA tests, suggested that the key to success was not so much the length of the day as the amount of time spent on core subjects. An extra hour a week devoted to literacy, maths and science raised test scores. Girls, immigrants and poor children appear to have benefited most. Beneath the argument over the merits of longer hours lurks a deeper one about whether English education should copy Asian teaching, with its greater emphasis on rote learning and insistent testing. Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington College, a private school, says not: "It's dull, dull, dull." Five hours is the maximum classroom time which is effective, Mr Seldon thinks. Schools should focus on better lessons rather than longer ones. But Mr Gove has a point, particularly when it comes to helping weaker pupils. England has a "long tail" of underachievers, who stubbornly resist attempts to improve their performance. The last, Labour, government sought to aid them by proposing more after-school and homework clubs. Mr Gove would like more actual teaching as well. Anna Vignoles, professor of education at Cambridge University, thinks that less able pupils and those from poorer backgrounds are most likely to gain from extended hours, as long as spreading teachers" time more thinly does not merely translate into less well-prepared lessons. Higher achievers might complain that they are staying longer in the classroom for little obvious gain. But if the test results of weaker pupils improve significantly, England would overtake several other countries in the global education race. That might well be worth a later bus home.