Education experts defend the split school day that the Community of Madrid will impose on the next schools that will be built in the region. They consider that “helps improve performance academic students, who reduces inequalities and this can reduce the rate of early school dropout. Something that has also been endorsed by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
This positioning of the experts comes after the president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, announced that all new public early childhood and primary schools built in the region will also teach the 1st and 2nd years of compulsory secondary education and will have a compulsory split day. This was announced during the debate on the state of the region, where it was also explained that “schools that have a split day will not be able to switch to the intensive schedule from the 2025/26 school year.”
Ismael Sanz, professor at URJC and head of the Funcas Education Economics program, argues that the measure of the Community of Madrid to implement the split school day “would be positive to prevent inequalities from worsening.”
Furthermore, this expert considers that the split school day is, overall, “good” for several reasons, among which it should be noted that the children will have more breaks, more recreations and, therefore, “they can recover from the care they received and have less cognitive fatigue.”
“There comes a time when they get tired of listening and have less capacity to learn when they have been listening to the teacher for a long time. That is the great advantage, because if this is not the case intensive day you have classes very close together and there comes a time when cognitive fatigue affects the most, affecting the most disadvantaged students the most,” he said.
Likewise, Sanz confirms that the split day can be a factor that contributes to reducing the school dropout rate, because “it could help prevent deficits from accumulating in primary school and then making learning difficult in secondary school.”
For his part, Raul Adames, director of the CEU school sector, said in statements to Europe Press that “with the broken day the school can manage the schedule more flexibly, since you have more flexibility to distribute the schedule and make it more suitable for the student’s rest.
In addition to improving activity at school, Adames believes that the split day also allows “It often helps with family reconciliation” while continuous change generates schedules and spaces that, in his opinion, “are not appropriate.”
The director of the Institute of Educational Innovation of the University of Villanueva and president of COFAPA, Begoña Ladrón de Guevara, expressed a similar view, stating that the split day is “pedagogically better” for the students’ school life, because “Having spaces where there are no classes allows us to consolidate what is taught in class, helps the most vulnerable children and contributes to better nutrition.”
In this sense, he recalled that the school has two functions, one academic and a second socialization function, such as lunchtime, the playground or recess, which, in his opinion, “are equally important, formative and fundamental for the school life of children.
Parents’ associations
The Federation of the Community of Madrid of Parents’ Associations (FAPA), Francisco Giner de los Ríos, also supports the measure promoted by Isabel Díaz Ayuso. According to him, “a greater and better distributed school time contributes positively to the overall development of students, both from an academic point of view and in terms of physical and emotional well-being.”
The aforementioned federation mentions a report published by the European Commission in 2021 on education systems in Europe that supports the benefits of having school schedules better distributed between morning and afternoon, highlighting how these models facilitate greater retention of information and better adaptation to the biological rhythms of students.
The report, titled Education and Training Monitor 2021“, stresses that “education systems that provide students with adequate breaks throughout the day promote deeper learning and more balanced socio-emotional development, particularly in early adolescence.”
Schools with 1st and 2nd ESO
The President of the Community of Madrid also announced that the new schools that will be built will be public schools for children, primary and 1st and 2nd years of compulsory secondary education (CEIPSO) so that “Minors are better protected.”
These centres will join the dozen centres in the region that already offer these same courses and courses, with whose educational communities we will work so that they also adopt the split day. For their part, the thirty CEIPSOs that teach the four courses of the complete secondary cycle and already have an intensive day They will offer new activities with the aim that students who have greater difficulty finding alternatives in the afternoon can spend more hours at school.
FAPA Giner de los Ríos defends that this measure “would mean that (students) could use the canteen service until the 2nd year of the ESO, so students who currently lose the right to apply for the canteen scholarship, for not having the service in their educational center, they could at least benefit from it until they reach the third year.
“We believe that this measure will promote the quality of education, the well-being of our sons and daughters and the reconciliation of families. We are convinced that these initiatives will contribute to reducing school dropout and providing a more equitable education adapted to the real needs of students,” they declare from the aforementioned federation.
