The Malta Independent 13 February 2025, Thursday
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TMID Editorial: Extending school hours and quality time

Wednesday, 22 January 2025, 10:01 Last update: about 21 days ago

In the past days there have been suggestions that school hours should be extended to better align with work schedules, thereby enabling parents or guardians to work full-time jobs.

It's a recycled proposal, Malta Union of Teachers president Marco Bonnici said when asked about this in an interview which was published in the latest edition of The Malta Independent on Sunday.

His argument is that there are pre-school and after-school programmes which are available, which means that parents and guardians have the possibility to leave their children under supervision in an organised structure both before schooling hours start and long after they finish. The breakfast club and Klabb 3-16 are there to be used.

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What Bonnici is saying is that school hours should not be touched, and that the MUT will be strongly against any attempt to increase them.

There are no plans to do so, and so for the time being it is just a subject that was brought up for public discussion after the completion of a study made by the National Commission for the Promotion of Equality.

But, beyond the extension of school hours which, we repeat, are not on the agenda, there are other issues that should be discussed.

One of them is family quality time. It does not take much to understand that families today spend little quality time together. And things get worse year after year.

Many families are in situations where both adults work, out of choice or because of necessity, and this already eats into the time children have with their parents or guardians. When one then adds part-time jobs - evenings and weekends - to make ends meet in a world where it is becoming more expensive to survive, then more and more time is taken away from being together as a family.

Many also opt to send children to after school activities such as drama, art, sport and dance - which in the end mean more expenses and, again, less time spent together. Back home, it is often the case that the children are left on their own, with devices keeping them company while the adults carry out their indoor chores. It would be interesting to know how many families actually have a meal together.

Bonnici, in the comments he gave to this media house, is correct to say that children should be raised by their parents or someone close to their environment. Yet, even here, the notion of an extended family is not what it used to be a few decades ago. If grandpa and grandma both work, there are no close relatives to take care of the kids. It is not uncommon to have 10-year-olds being given the house key and returning to an empty home once school finishes.

We're not pointing fingers at anyone. We're just describing the way society is today.

To suggest that all this could be resolved by extending school hours - even if teachers had to agree with it, which they won't - is narrow-minded.

It is a much more complex situation than that.


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