WOULD LONGER SCHOOL YEARS IMPROVE PUPILS’ LATER LIFE OUTCOMES?

Changing the amount of time that children spend in school each year has little effect on how they do in terms of employment and earnings in later life. That is the central finding of research by Professor Jörn-Steffen Pischke, published in the October 2007 issue of the Economic Journal. He concludes that the content of the curriculum is far more important than time in school for pupil performance.

Primary and secondary school pupils in the UK attend school for around 190 days a year compared with 208 days in East Asian countries. Since East Asian pupils frequently score highly on international comparison tests, it is tempting to conclude that longer school years translate into better pupil performance.

Existing research evidence on this issue is slim but this study suggests that such a conclusion is unwarranted. Pischke looks at the impact of a reform of the West German school system in 1966-67, which dramatically reduced the amount of instructional time for some pupils. He finds that varying the amount of time in school has little impact on how the affected pupils fared later in the labour market.

Until the 1960s, all German states except Bavaria started the school year in the spring. From 1967, these states moved the start of the school year to the end of the summer. This transition was achieved in most states through two ‘short school years’ with only 24 instead of the regular 37 weeks of instruction each. As a result, pupils in school during this time lost about two thirds of a school year in instructional time.

This event makes it possible to study the effect of instructional time on pupil performance because it was short-lived and there was a lot of variation in which pupils in Germany were affected.

The German ‘short school years’ seemed to have a clear impact on the learning of pupils. While pupils seemed to learn more quickly during this period, this did not completely make up for the missed time. As a result, more pupils repeated a grade. Fewer pupils entered the more selective secondary schools.

Nevertheless, despite the large reduction in instructional time, the affected pupils had caught up with peers who were unaffected only a few years later. Most importantly, the study finds no long-term effects on employment or earnings of the cohorts that were affected.

This is in stark contrast to research on the effectiveness of raising the school leaving age, for example, which finds large labour market effects. This suggests that lengthening or shortening the school year, a much more measured intervention than the German ‘short school years’, is unlikely to have large effects either.

The results of this study suggest that time in school is not necessarily the most important margin when we are trying to improve the performance of pupils. The absence of detrimental effects of the German reform seem to stem partly from the fact that schools concentrated more resources on studying the core academic subjects, such as reading, writing and mathematics to the detriment of other subjects, such as arts, music or physical education.

This suggests that the curriculum – rather than time in school – ought to deserve more scrutiny. This finding is in line with other recent evidence on the efficacy of curriculum-based interventions like the literacy hour in English primary schools.

ENDS

Notes for editors: ‘The Impact of Length of the School Year on Student Performance and Earnings: Evidence from the German Short School Years’ by Jörn-Steffen Pischke is published in the October 2007 issue of the Economic Journal.

Jörn-Steffen Pischke is at the professor of economics at the London School of Economics and acting director of the Centre for Economic Performance (CEP) research programme on labour markets.

For further information: contact Steve Pischke on 020-7955-6509 (email: s.pischke@lse.ac.uk); or Romesh Vaitilingam on 07768-661095 (email: romesh@compuserve.com).