Why are schools locked shut most of the time?

The starting point for this post was a BBC Radio 4 Life Scientific programme this week during which Mark Miodownik called for public libraries to be replaced by public workshops in which people could make things. Then, in an online conversation with other members of the Everything Unplugged group it was suggested that it would be better to leave libraries alone and set up the proposed public workshops in schools or colleges.

This got me thinking about the fact that schools and colleges are locked shut for far more hours in the year than any other public building I can think of. Just look at the table below.

	Open to users	Hours per year
Hospital A&E department	24 hours a day, 365 day per year	8,760
Royal Festival Hall public spaces (where the Everything Unplugged group meets each week)	From 10 in the morning until about 10 at night every day except for Christmas day	4,368
My local supermarket	84 hours per week	4,300
My local library	64.5 hours per week except for public holidays	3,200
A school	About 6 hours per day for 190 days per year	1,140

I accept that some schools do extend their opening hours slightly for various forms of community use but this is the exception rather than the rule, and it makes little significant difference to the scale of underuse indicated in the final column of the table above.  

We the public have paid for the schools and for the expensive facilities and resources they contain. So why are we the public kept away from these resources while the buildings remain locked shut for most of the time?  Surely the way in which schools are currently underused represents a huge lost opportunity as well as an enormous waste of capital expenditure.

But actually the situation is even worse than this! Not only are children and adults alike locked out of schools most of the time, but children are, in effect, locked into schools for every one of the 190 days that schools choose to open each year. And any parent who does not ensure that their child attends on these 190 arbitrarily chosen days runs the risk of being fined or imprisoned. Such sanctions are being enforced with increasing rigour, as this BBC new item explains.

But is there any evidence that children learn best in 5-hour chunks on 190 days of the year? No there isn’t. Is there evidence that different children have very different rhythms of learning (so that some children might, for example, learn better in smaller chunks of time spread over many more than 190 days)? Yes there is. Is there any evidence that most real learning takes place outside of school lessons anyway? Yes, there certainly is.

So we surely need to re-imagine schools and colleges as much more flexible and open places, as places where children and adults can tap into resources, facilities and expertise in a variety of different ways and at a variety of different times to suit their own particularly needs and interests.

Why don’t we start a campaign called ‘4,000 hours’? Central to the campaign’s manifesto would be a call to make all publicly funded schools, colleges and universities open to the public for at least 4,000 hours each year.

Image of locked gates is in the public domain. For more information about image click here.

Comments

[Adamwarren0]

I agree about the under-utilisation of schools and colleges, but increasing use will require paying people to faciliate the activities - and paying school caretakers, administrators etc to make it all happen. It also needs a large number of people who are willing to regularly invest their time (and a small but significant amount of money) to attend these courses. In the olden days we had 'evening classes' - I even ran some of these - and the uptake of online MOOCs clearly shows there is a continuing appetite for non-assessed learning. Until recently I was a governor at a local secondary school, and we worked hard to make use of our facilities in the evening. We had a deal with a local college who ran several evening courses, but that was still only a very few rooms out of the many classrooms on site; most of our income came from clubs using our sports hall. So it isn't simply about opening the space, it is about managing it and developing a community who regularly make use of it.