A “critical teacher shortage” is behind the Queensland government’s push toward “flexible arrangements” for students, potentially including four-day school weeks, education experts believe.
And it’s feared any changes could increase the disparity in outcomes between private and public school students, with the trend expected to continue throughout Australia.
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The state education department has written to schools to provide the framework for changing their operating hours from 2024 under an updated learning policy.
The framework will force schools to undertake wide consultation before any change to learning hours are made, Education Minister Grace Grace said.
“There is now solid and consistent scrutiny that schools have to go through to implement any changes,” she said on Thursday.
“This is an updated policy, that if a school is looking at some flexible arrangements, like they did at Fortitude Valley (State Secondary College) where they started later and finish later, there is now a procedure and a policy they have to go through.
“They will have to go through extensive community and school community consultation. There’s greater scrutiny on what is being done.”
She stressed the framework was “definitely not a green light for a four-day week”.
“In fact, schools are expected to operate over the five days per week,” Grace said.
The Queensland Teachers Union’s Kresta Richardson said “lots” of schools had “modified” programs, where students take time out of school to undertake vocational training or study.
She said there appeared to be a global trend toward workplace flexibility as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“I think that there are a lot of workforces around the world trying to access a little bit more flexibility,” Richardson told 7NEWS.
“I think COVID really showed us that that is something people are after.
“Students we have in our schools, they learn a bit different these days. They’re certainly looking for a little bit of flexibility as well.
“When we’re looking at modified school hours, it’s for a range of purposes, not just for teachers. There are benefits for students as well.”
A US study in 2021 showed more than 1600 schools in 24 states had adopted four-day school weeks.
It found schools implemented the shorter weeks for cost savings as a result of budget-cutting measures, staff retention and to combat students attendance issues related to long-distance travel or family-work commitments such as farming.
However it concluded that shorter schooling hours “may impact student achievement”.
“We demonstrate that instructional time in tested subjects is lower in four-day school week schools, which may have direct implications for student learning and test-score performance in these subjects,” the report, published in Education Finance and Policy, said.
“Thus, school officials considering these types of alternative school schedules should be cognisant of the potential instructional time implications of such a change.”
Richardson agrees a four-day week could help with staff retention, with the industry facing a “teacher shortage in Queensland, as well as in Australia and globally”.
“If we can look a little bit more flexibly about how we can make school operate, that way we might attract more people to the professional and, when they’re there, we might be able to retain them a little bit longer,” she said.
Scott Stanford, from the Teachers’ Professional Association of Queensland, said he supports the idea of a four-day school week, particularly for students in their final years, if “parents are consulted properly”.
He said many students were already taking a day off per week to study or “prepare for the real world, what’s coming up after school”.
But he expressed doubt that the concept would address the roots of teacher retention problems, despite the possibility of an easier workload.
“I think this is totally about a teacher shortage,” he said.
“Teachers are leaving in droves because they don’t want to put up with having to deal with paperwork. They just want to teach.
“There is a staffing shorting across Australia. Until we start paying our teachers better, it’s going to continue.
“It’s taking away 20 per cent of the school week, just because we have a teacher shortage that they need to fix in the first place.”
Deakin University education expert Emma Rowe said the move toward flexibility is “essentially enabling public schools to close their doors because they don’t have teachers”.
She said she could envision a move toward four-day weeks for public schools broadly across Australia “for sure”, fearing “disadvantages” public school students face compared to private school counterparts “will only increase”.
“The context of this policy is a critical teacher shortage which is being experienced all across the country, which impacts public schools to a greater extent that private schools,” she told 7NEWS.com.au.
“So here we have a policy that specifically enables public schools to close their doors, arguably impacting lower socio-economic status students and their families to a greater extent, and offering spurious caveats that schools shouldn’t be doing this — even though this is what the policy allows.”
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