A seven day economy

lostinrates

ToasterScheme wrote: »

No-one's mentioned schools yet. What shall we do with those?

Maybe we consider a different model? We know that the peaks and troughs of holidays cause pricing issues for things like holidays.

Perhaps we consider shorter holiday school with three or four days attendances for which it becomes more standard to expect to make up missed days with tuition if school is missed for vacation with private tuition. but include more physical and arts education on the 'down day' schedule? Dunno.

Thrugelmir

lostinrates wrote: »

Instead of expecting five day working weeks,

Predominantly being female. The NHS already has issues with the number of nurses now wanting to suit hours to fit their own family requirements. If hubby works shifts i,e. distribution depots, haulage, manufacturing. Then the problems will simply compound.

The real danger is that some vocations will simply no longer be appealing. Seems as GP's have had enough. With many planning to retire in the next 5 years. You don't these overnight.

IveSeenTheLight

lostinrates wrote: »

Maybe we consider a different model? We know that the peaks and troughs of holidays cause pricing issues for things like holidays.

Perhaps we consider shorter holiday school with three or four days attendances for which it becomes more standard to expect to make up missed days with tuition if school is missed for vacation with private tuition. but include more physical and arts education on the 'down day' schedule? Dunno.

When I lived in Malaysia, they had 18 public holidays (but only 14 annual holidays for the locals).

The Chinese community would send their children to School on a Saturday to make up for missing the public holiday on the Monday / Friday.

The culture was that you didn't get free days off and had to make it up

Thrugelmir

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

When I lived in Malaysia, they had 18 public holidays (but only 14 annual holidays for the locals).

The Chinese community would send their children to School on a Saturday to make up for missing the public holiday on the Monday / Friday.

The culture was that you didn't get free days off and had to make it up

Perhaps reducing the amount of annual leave would improve productivity.

IveSeenTheLight

Thrugelmir wrote: »

Perhaps reducing the amount of annual leave would improve productivity.

The total leave was comparable with the UK, so the amount of leave could have been considered appropriate.

The point was not about that though and about the Chinese community sending children to school for additional days to make up for public holidays

LydiaJ

kabayiri wrote: »

Easy.

Increasingly, the 21st century student will log on remotely on a Sunday evening, to be taught by an Indian professor of something.

Oh, someone will be along shortly telling me that we can outsource sales and IT and support functions but not education - it's "special"...

I don't believe it somehow. The need to control costs will prevail.

Education that's done online, usually with some kind of interactive software that doesn't require real time input from a live human teacher, can easily be flexed around the week. Increasing amounts of adult education, CPD and so on are being done this way.

We are a long way away from that in schools at the moment though. Adult education is fine - the adults have mostly signed up for it voluntarily and want to complete whatever it is they are doing - or else they give up but nobody minds if they do. They are safe to be alone, and able to be responsible for their own behaviour and welfare. OTOH, Teaching children and young people in schools is about a lot more than supplying information. Some kids would dutifully log on and start doing what the distant professor instructed them to do, but a lot would find much more exciting things to do with their time, and a professor on the other side of the world wouldn't be able to do a lot about it. The distance would also be a significant disadvantage in the pastoral aspect of school, not to mention the safeguarding and supervising. How many parents would be happy to leave their children alone at home all day, with only an online teacher for company, or to deliver them to a "school" unstaffed by adults or with a colossal child/adult ratio?

lostinrates wrote: »

Maybe we consider a different model? We know that the peaks and troughs of holidays cause pricing issues for things like holidays.

Perhaps we consider shorter holiday school with three or four days attendances for which it becomes more standard to expect to make up missed days with tuition if school is missed for vacation with private tuition. but include more physical and arts education on the 'down day' schedule? Dunno.

But that would make things worse. The shorter the holidays, the more people there are trying to cram their holidays into a smaller length of time. And it's wildly unrealistic to expect parents (especially parents of children at state schools who are used to getting education for free) to fork out for private tuition every time they go away if going away during term time becomes the norm. I don't understand how you envisage organising the staffing, either. Are the academic teachers to work 3 or 4 day weeks, with other teachers coming in on the "down" days to teach the other stuff? Or would you want the other stuff taught by non-specialists? Could you explain what you had in mind?

Besides being prohibitively expensive for many, the private tuition idea wouldn't work well for many subjects, or maybe most subjects. When is this tuition to take place? If a kid goes on holiday for two weeks, when they come back to school they come back into my lesson not just with a gap in their knowledge that they need to make up at some point between now and the end of the course, but usually with a gap in their understanding that will make the next week's lessons incomprehensible (or at least confusing and demoralising) because they build on the bit that went before. It differs between subjects, but in something as conceptual as physics, you can mix up the order of the topics, but within a topic you need to learn the ideas in the order in which they stack on top of each other. I know it's inconvenient for parents, but education really does work best if you attend all the lessons in the right order.

lostinrates

LydiaJ wrote: »

Education that's done online, usually with some kind of interactive software that doesn't require real time input from a live human teacher, can easily be flexed around the week. Increasing amounts of adult education, CPD and so on are being done this way.

We are a long way away from that in schools at the moment though. Adult education is fine - the adults have mostly signed up for it voluntarily and want to complete whatever it is they are doing - or else they give up but nobody minds if they do. They are safe to be alone, and able to be responsible for their own behaviour and welfare. OTOH, Teaching children and young people in schools is about a lot more than supplying information. Some kids would dutifully log on and start doing what the distant professor instructed them to do, but a lot would find much more exciting things to do with their time, and a professor on the other side of the world wouldn't be able to do a lot about it. The distance would also be a significant disadvantage in the pastoral aspect of school, not to mention the safeguarding and supervising. How many parents would be happy to leave their children alone at home all day, with only an online teacher for company, or to deliver them to a "school" unstaffed by adults or with a colossal child/adult ratio?



But that would make things worse. The shorter the holidays, the more people there are trying to cram their holidays into a smaller length of time. And it's wildly unrealistic to expect parents (especially parents of children at state schools who are used to getting education for free) to fork out for private tuition every time they go away if going away during term time becomes the norm. I don't understand how you envisage organising the staffing, either. Are the academic teachers to work 3 or 4 day weeks, with other teachers coming in on the "down" days to teach the other stuff? Or would you want the other stuff taught by non-specialists? Could you explain what you had in mind?

Besides being prohibitively expensive for many, the private tuition idea wouldn't work well for many subjects, or maybe most subjects. When is this tuition to take place? If a kid goes on holiday for two weeks, when they come back to school they come back into my lesson not just with a gap in their knowledge that they need to make up at some point between now and the end of the course, but usually with a gap in their understanding that will make the next week's lessons incomprehensible (or at least confusing and demoralising) because they build on the bit that went before. It differs between subjects, but in something as conceptual as physics, you can mix up the order of the topics, but within a topic you need to learn the ideas in the order in which they stack on top of each other. I know it's inconvenient for parents, but education really does work best if you attend all the lessons in the right order.

I think its clear I have been throwing ideas off the cuff:D;)


I also think its also that there are solutions for most issues.

Ok, let's take catch up work. Perhaps catchup work could be covered by working through syllabus solo/ w. Teacher assistant support on down days?

I'm not sure I 'envisage' anything as in a 'whole complete package ready to sell as an idea, but yes, the basis is people working three and four day weeks, but to provide seven day opening hours. So schools might be open seven days. They might for example, choose to run two separate streams of teaching within that, the three day and the your day academic stream, or two three point five days.

Failing that, why is there no market for catch up, support school or extra tuition using current facilities and teachers wanting overtime or part time jobs, those who no longer want to be full time teachers?



We are told there are many in nursing and teaching and other jobs who find their jobs untenable. I think I would too. . I never had a bone in me for that sort of vocation and admire those who had any of it!

zagubov

kabayiri wrote: »

Easy.

Increasingly, the 21st century student will log on remotely on a Sunday evening, to be taught by an Indian professor of something.

Oh, someone will be along shortly telling me that we can outsource sales and IT and support functions but not education - it's "special"...

I don't believe it somehow. The need to control costs will prevail.

It could work and be quite cheap. For a tiny handful of really capable self-disciplined and very mature students.

For everybody else...........hmmm. There's room for doubt.;)

kabayiri

lostinrates wrote: »

I think its clear I have been throwing ideas off the cuff:D;)


I also think its also that there are solutions for most issues.
...

I think Lydia makes valid points, but there are weaknesses in the current system too.

I remember in the early 90s someone telling me precisely why IT couldn't be outsourced wholesale! I'm sure they had valid issues too.

Back to the 7 day economy, are we saying certain vocations are off limits; say education, the higher levels of judiciary? What about the politicians working in shifts?

It concerns me that when people talk about flexible working, they mean it's okay for the masses; the retail workers and hotel workers, but not for those higher up the ladder. I find that a bit elitist.

LydiaJ

lostinrates wrote: »

I think its clear I have been throwing ideas off the cuff:D;)

I also think its also that there are solutions for most issues.

There probably are. Whether those solutions are economically viable is another question.

lostinrates wrote: »

Ok, let's take catch up work. Perhaps catchup work could be covered by working through syllabus solo/ w. Teacher assistant support on down days?

Might work with younger children. In fact, I admit I have too little experience of what goes on in primary schools to have any idea whether your ideas might work very well there... or not. You'd need to ask a primary teacher. The older the student, though, the harder it would be for a TA to deal with. It would be fine until the student got to a bit they didn't understand and started asking questions. If the TA doesn't know the subject well enough to be able to answer whatever questions the student comes up with, then things get stuck. Students wrestling with a conceptual subject are a bit like toddlers - they keep asking "why?" and a lot of the time they ask questions you couldn't have predicted. If the TA does know the subject that well, they should be working as a teacher and paid as such!

lostinrates wrote: »

I'm not sure I 'envisage' anything as in a 'whole complete package ready to sell as an idea, but yes, the basis is people working three and four day weeks, but to provide seven day opening hours. So schools might be open seven days. They might for example, choose to run two separate streams of teaching within that, the three day and the your day academic stream, or two three point five days.

I find it hard to imagine fitting the curriculum into 3.5 or even 4 days without the decrease in frequency with which each class would see each teacher having a significantly negative effect on continuity from one lesson to the next, but that may be because I've never tried it. If anybody has ever taught in a country where they do things that way, it would be interesting to hear from them.

As a parent, it feels to me like a nightmare. With me teaching at one secondary school, DS at a different secondary and DD at primary, I imagine each of these schools would divide up its week differently, so it would prove impossible for us all to be doing the same 3.5 or 4 days, so every day at least one of us would be in school, and there would be no days with all of us off at once. I appreciate that this is already a problem for families where the parents work in sectors where weekend work is the norm, but I think the detrimental effect on families of different children going to school on different days of the week would be even worse.

lostinrates wrote: »

Failing that, why is there no market for catch up, support school or extra tuition using current facilities and teachers wanting overtime or part time jobs, those who no longer want to be full time teachers?

There is! There's a huge market in tuition, and although most state schools aren't set up to host it on their premises, independent schools often are. The first school where I taught did this kind of thing. When I was part time I had a couple of kids for extra tuition - one each from 5-6pm on different days of the week. They weren't in my classes - that would have been weird - but were taught in the classroom by other members of my department, and had tuition from me. It was great for me - all the resources of the department at hand made it much more convenient than trying to do tuition at home, and it was so easy to liaise frequently with the class teacher about what was most needed.

It would have to be done by either teachers who just did catch up and tuition, or teachers who did classroom teaching part time and tuition part time (as I did). Full time teachers have enough to do already without taking on that kind of extra workload.

I haven't heard of it happening in state schools - we need a state school teacher to come along and tell us (a) whether it already happens, and (b) whether it would be feasible to expand this kind of thing into the state sector. I imagine there would be issues with the money side of things - although if a state school charges pupils extra to have, say, instrumental music lessons one to one, then I don't immediately see why they couldn't apply the same process to academic tuition. There might be friction, though, caused by some students qualifying for one to one help for free because of special needs, while students not meeting the criteria were having to pay for tuition. Any state school teachers reading this who can comment, please?

lostinrates wrote: »

We are told there are many in nursing and teaching and other jobs who find their jobs untenable. I think I would too. . I never had a bone in me for that sort of vocation and admire those who had any of it!

I never had a bone in me for self-employment, or for running a smallholding. I admire you too!