Starting school later could transform teenagers’ learning – so why don’t we do it?
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Loading... - Bell Stephen
- 22 Feb 2023
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“Young people have two big activities in their day: time at school, and hopefully time in bed,” says Liza Edmonds (Ngā Puhi, Ngāti Whātua), a paediatrician who works at Otago University. Edmonds, a member of the School Start Times Study Advisory Group, is a co-author of a paper published in January in the New Zealand Medical Journal, arguing that making school start times later is one clear way to target some of the challenges teenagers face in attending and paying attention at school.
“It’s easier to zone out when I’m tired,” says Nina, a year 10 student in Christchurch. Nina sets three alarms in the morning, at 6:30, 6:35, and 6:40, to help her wake up and get to the bus on time. She tries to get seven or eight hours of sleep, but finds that even if she goes to bed early, she doesn’t feel sleepy until 11 or 12. “I tend to be more productive at night,” she says; she does her homework later in the evening, too.
Research backs up Nina’s experience. “Teenagers’ sleep rhythms are different,” says Edmonds; young people are naturally more alert at night and take longer to wake up in the morning, representing the human variety in chronotypes. (Incidentally, evolutionary biology argues that this is to make sure there’s always someone awake, keeping watch). Edmond cites research showing that teenagers don’t stop producing melatonin, the sleep-inducing hormone, until 7am, while adults stop around 4am, meaning that, to a teenager, being woken at seven feels like being woken at four.
In Aotearoa, at least 39% of adolescents report getting less sleep than is needed for their age, and 57% say their sleep is of poor quality. This inadequate sleep impacts ability to focus and retain information, impeding learning. Read More…
