Чтение и письмо: полемическое эссе (градация и контраргумент)

LET THEM SLEEP — BUT LET US PAY

I want to argue for something smaller than the headline. Not that every secondary school should open at ten, but that the schools which ask to should be allowed to try — for two years, with the first year's costs met from the centre, and with the results published whether they flatter the idea or bury it.

The case rests on three things, and I will put the weakest last. First, adolescent sleep runs late: the evidence from sleep laboratories is consistent that the teenage body clock shifts by roughly two hours, and no amount of parental firmness moves it back. Second, where a later start has been tried, attendance rose and lateness fell — in both published trials, by amounts that would be called significant if a new textbook had produced them. Third, and weakest, road accidents involving pupils fell in the trial areas; the numbers are small, and I claim no more than that they point the right way.

Now the case against, which is better than its opponents usually admit. It is not that change is uncomfortable. It is that a later start is a later finish, and a later finish is paid for by working parents in childcare, by pupils in lost part-time work, and by the poorest families most, because they are the ones who cannot buy the afternoon. In the trial schools, thirty per cent of families reported higher costs in the first year. That is a real number, and anyone who waves it away has not understood the objection.

There is a second alternative, and it deserves stating properly: leave the day alone and move the sleep instead — screen curfews, consistent bedtimes, later homework deadlines. This is cheaper, disturbs no bus and no employer, and it was tested in the same schools. It moved sleep by ten minutes. The later start moved it by forty. I do not say the curfew is worthless; I say it is a quarter of the answer, and we have been offering it as the whole.

So where does the cost objection actually bite? Not on whether a later start works, but on who pays for the year in which the town rearranges itself around it. In year two of the same trial, the thirty per cent had fallen to eight, because buses were rescheduled, clubs moved and employers adjusted — as they do after every timetable change we have ever made. The objection is therefore an argument about transition, and the honest response to a transition cost is to fund the transition, not to forbid the destination.

I concede what should be conceded. The exam results are untested; I do not claim them. The eight per cent who still pay more in year two are real, and a trial that does not target them is a trial that has learned nothing from its own critics. And the schools that volunteered so far were better-off than average, which means the attendance gain has been shown for schools like them and not yet for schools unlike them — which is an argument for testing in such schools, not for assuming.

Let them sleep, then — but let us pay: the first year funded, the eight per cent covered, a stopping rule at two terms, and the data published. That is not a revolution. It is the smallest experiment that would settle a question we have been arguing about for twenty years on the strength of no evidence at all.