Pupils in England should spend more hours at school each day and have shorter holidays, the Education Secretary Michael Gove has argued.

Speaking at an education conference in London, Mr Gove said: “It is already the case that some of the best schools in the country recognise the need to change the structure of the school term.

“It’s also the case that some of the best schools in the country recognise that we need to have a longer school day as well.”

The headteachers’ union ASCL said quality of learning was more important than hours spent in the classroom.

I think this view is an interesting one and may have its merits, but if it were to be implemented it would need a lot of research to ensure that the intended goals were achieved. Comparisons with other countries are only valid if they are examined extremely closely and any local peculiarities taken into account, including teaching methods and assessment systems.

Brian Lightman of the Association of School and College Leaders (ASCL) said: “Some schools are introducing innovative changes to the school day and term and it will be interesting to see what effect these have in the longer term on achievement.”

He warned that changes should be based on sound, researched evidence, “not on anecdotes from other countries with vastly different cultures and attitudes to education”.

Many schools in the UK already operate longer days than used to be the case. At Polam Hall School our basic day is already 8.45am to 4.00pm for secondary age students, though a large part of the idea here is to enable lunchtimes to be long enough to support extracurricular activities.

Interestingly the Independent schools in the UK have the shortest terms, but the top of the league tables is dominated by academically selective independent schools. Full boarding schools have even shorter terms, though they do operate a six day week to compensate. It is not just a question of the length of the year therefore when it comes to looking at educational outcomes.

I remember being told about a piece of research on the benefits of summer holiday academic work schemes a little while ago. The group that benefited most from this type of programme were pupils from lower income or deprived backgrounds because typically middle-class families were doing lots of things in the holidays that helped their children develop – museum and gallery visits, paid for holiday courses, holidays incorporating cultural activities and the like.

The obvious conclusion to draw therefore would be to do the research and come up with a range of options so that local communities can be best served by programmes that meet local needs. Perhaps this is far too obvious a solution and instead we may get a centralised decision.

That said there are plenty of different patterns being explored around the country, both in the sense of length of day and the shapes of terms. Some schools are doing a lot of work with online learning as well to break down the home-school barrier, to try and develop a sense of anywhere, anytime learning. In the longer term, with rapid improvements in mobile technologies, this is undoubtedly going to become more and more significant.

The next steps will include online assessments and experiments are already being made in that direction abroad and now in the UK.

John Moreland