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> Pupils described feeling overwhelmed at their former schools with their large classes

This school has made a lot of changes all in one go, which seem broadly positive, but I’d bet that almost all the benefit comes from this: smaller class sizes.

I went to schools with 35 students per teacher and schools with 11 students per teacher. The difference was stark. I also went to schools with those two ends of the spectrum on length of the day and can’t remember much of a difference.

Did you go to two schools with the same length of day but different number of students per teacher? As that would be the way to work out the difference between the two.

I would imagine an 8 hour day where there are fewer students to teachers be an easier scenario to study in than one whereby you study with many peers per teacher, which I would expect causes far more social and mental stresses and focuses. I also imagine those with fewer students per teacher, have time to focus on better teaching methods and more holistic and healthy approaches, whilst teaching to many would require a different mode of teaching.

The point I am getting at is that in the same settings of peer to teacher ratio, there is likely a sweet spot whereby you hit the maximum amount you can take in per day, before learning anymore is really not worth it. Likewise the longer you stay beyond that point, you are not going to be resting as much and you would end up borrowing from tomorrow's lessons (burn out). Based on that, it seems highly unlikely that the ideal amount of time at school for say a 7 year old or a teen, is the exact same hours as a working adult day.

However I doubt these things will change. Just look at all the studies that show teens have a physiological need for a later waking pattern, yet we have made no attempts to change the start of their school day to be optimised to give them the best chance each day.

> Did you go to two schools with the same length of day but different number of students per teacher?

Not as extreme a difference in number of students or length of day, no. I realise this is anecdotal, just proposing a theory that makes most sense to me. I suspect you're right that there's a sweet spot on all of these things.

The school I was at that did ~8:30-4:15 (vs ~9-3:30) also had half a day on Saturday. I distinctly remember the Saturday morning school causing more burnout feeling than the longer days during the week. Partly that will have been because of the weekend things I was missing out on, so it's hard to accurately judge, but I don't think 5.5 days of school was a good choice there.

If you are lucky enough to be born in a family which goes through posh London and then goes into posh universities and does a posh job in posh London, that is maybe the peak of our civilization right now.
They still live on the wrong side of the river.
If you look at the school's website you can see who they really serve: the well heeled of SW London: Richmond, Fulham, etc. Not, say, Tooting, Balham, Sutton. Which is ironic because their location, in Morden, is right in the middle of a gigantic sprawling estate of soulless 1930s commuter homes.

Easy to laugh, of course, but education is such a fraught subject in the UK (parents feel the stakes are so incredibly high) that I guess they saw a gap and filled it.

You need a family where one of your patents doesn't work, or at least they can pay a full day babysitter on Friday.
Plenty work 4 day weeks now. This needs to be introduced in tandem with work changes. School shouldn't be a babysitting service nor an intro to work, it should be about exposure to the world around them.
> School shouldn't be a babysitting service

It sounds good until you have kids and have to work to earn your daily bread.

> nor an intro to work

It sounds good until you don't get hired becuase the other candidate can program a fizzbuzz.

A school that only is a babisitting facility or that only prepares you for work is not a good school, but they are two of the main objectives anyway.

They are the two primary objectives over the course of the last 20-30 years, however change can and should occur even if it does initially cause ripples. A child with enough exposure to the world would have zero issues programming fizzbuzz should it be required in the career they wish to go in. Learning how to learn and what you enjoy learning matters far more than rote learning how to act and be in a career. Of course, if you give a child an adults work day every weekday then of course they may struggle to find that as they will be burned out doing 10 hours a day.
anybody who goes to these schools have babysitters. i sell an app to some of these companies. posh villages has some of the best schools in the world and uk.
I've never regretted my education and only wanted more.

> response to concerns about children’s mental health and a shortage of teachers.

Ha! Getting educated is so bad for children, and how insufferable an extra day among their peers must be! Disgusting!

Education comes in many forms. School taught me about long division and the battle of Hastings, but weekends away with my family taught me about societal norms.

We hear lots of complaints these days about how mal-adjusted so many children are, but is there any wonder? They are whisked from after school clubs to private sports activities, then off to bed (or homework) once their mandatory activities are done. Some of this is because parents are terrified of being considered neglectful by under-stimulating their child - but then children never learn to just exist in the presence of events which are more important than themselves.

I think the teacher shortage is the true reason.
Yes. And I suppose "school cuts service 20%" or "school raises tuition by 25%" are not such pleasant headlines to read, despite being equivalent...
No kidding. My sister teaches at one of the best schools in London and they haven't been able to find perm teachers for such odd subjects as maths and physics for over a year.
Yes, being imprisoned with a large group of children was extremely painful to some of us.
The irony of learning about things like democracy and the bill of rights in an authoritarian school that suspended basic rights was not lost on me – and schools seem to be even more restrictive now.

But I have few complaints about kindergarten and undergraduate university education.

It was painful.
And we don't want to subject our children to that torture.
How else to solve childcare and socialization?
Mostly by doing the exact opposite of what the school system is today. Informal, friendly groups of mixed ages, no subjects or lessons, no exams, no marks. Not a theory, this works today.