What are Half-Days Really?

Let me be brave and bring up the thorny issue of half-days in our schools. The last three weeks at the end of the summer term all our schools close at lunchtime. The same thing happens for the first 1 or 2 weeks at the beginning of the autumn term in September. This does not happen in the private Gibraltar schools or in the UK where Gibraltar bases its school curriculum on, and there have been calls for Gibraltar to fall in line with the UK and carry on with full days until the end of term and simply finish the term earlier.

Parents, especially working parents, find the half-days are causing them problems with child care as they now need to finish work early to collect their children, and if they have children of different age groups it poses further problems as the First, Middle and Comprehensive schools do not have the same daily closing times. Criticism has been voiced from parents and pupils that not much happens in school during the half-day lessons and although many teachers do indeed continue to teach right up until the final day, others just put on a video for the children and simply oversee them at play. In fairness to the teaching staff, what does often undermine the effort to carry on with serious work is the very poor attendance of the pupils themselves which, in turn, makes those who have turned up feel less like doing work. Parents either do not bother sending their kids to school altogether or see it as an opportunity to take their family summer holiday and beat the crowds. This is all too common and has a detrimental knock-on effect on those parents and children who continue to abide by the law and send their children to school. Parents often have to do battle with their kids, especially teenagers, who don’t see the point in going to school as the class is half empty and in their view no proper lessons are taught anyway. Indeed, it seems that there are teachers who might start to wind down too soon and if this is the case then surely it's up to the parents to complain, but, as with many other issues, people generally don’t like to complain to the school about individuals so they voice their opinion on the street, hence this motion.

So why do we have half-days in Gibraltar and what is the point of them?

It apparently all boils down to basic mathematics. We have 6 periods in our school day. There are 18 days of summer hours when 4 periods are taught. That means during summer hours there are 72 periods taught. If you simply had 2 weeks of winter hours it would only be 60 periods. Mind boggling I know, but the fact is that we can't shorten the number of days that teachers work because we have to keep in-line with the UK. So, if we have to keep in-line with the UK then why don’t we just copy them completely?

The elephant in the room here is our old friend summer hours. Half-days are not actually half-days, they are summer hours, and because the rest of the civil service in Gibraltar has summer hours then so should our teachers. The reason our schools close early is not because it is too hot in the classroom and the children start nodding off, or anything to do with us not having the same amount of half-term holidays as the UK, it’s a simple fact of parity with other Gibraltar public sector employees. Everyone is entitled to summer hours so why should teachers work those extra hours when nobody else has to? Therefore should we have parity with the UK or parity with the local public sector?

As a society we want our children to be educated, by law they all have to attend school. Half-days are detrimental to the education of our children due to absenteeism which is not dealt with, detrimental to the children who don’t attend and detrimental to the ones who do. Are we ready and willing to clamp down on this absenteeism while at the same time ensuring that all teachers in all schools carry out serious lessons right up until the end of term? If we are ready to do that then we must act now. If not we need to find another way. A solution would be to ask teachers to forgo their summer hours but pay them the difference. We cannot expect our teachers to work extra hours for no pay so if that is what it really boils down to, then in order to solve this problem the solution is in the money. Would our teachers mind finishing their term earlier, as in the UK, and work full days right up until the end of term but pay them the difference? Double-parity, everyone is happy and the education of our children is safeguarded and enhanced. We need to talk about it.