The theme for this year’s World Teachers’ Day is “Teachers: Leading in crisis, reimagining the future”. To mark the occasion, we are putting live, for 24 hours, our special issue where teachers and other experts reimagine what education could look like. For access beyond World Teachers’ Day, and to get exclusive weekly content from Tes, subscribe here. The rest of the articles from this special issue can be found here. 

US: ‘School lets out at 2.45pm’

Rebecca McGrath is a teacher in a high school in New Jersey, US

New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the whole of the US, and sits on the East Coast, with its borders skirting past New York and Philadelphia.

School starts early here, at 7.20am. We have seven lessons of 43 minutes each, and teachers will teach for four. They will have one 43-minute lunch duty in the cafeteria, one preparation and planning period and a lunch break. School lets out at 2.45pm.

Many students are involved in clubs or sports after school. This is a choice, not a requirement. But this choice is sometimes guided by what they think universities want to see on their CV. Many students are accepted into a particular university because of their athletic ability.

Our sports programmes are very serious and often require multiple hours of practice and games per day, including in the summer and at weekends. Some students do not get home until well after dark.

For every class they take, students will have no more than an hour of homework, and no work is to be set over the holidays. However, many students take on elective advanced placement classes, and become overburdened by the extra work. This is common in high-performing schools like ours, where students are competing for university places.

Students are in school for 181 days. The year begins in September and runs until the end of June. Although we are off for all of July and August, that is balanced by having only a week off for Christmas and one week for spring break.

If we close for a snow day, we have three days in the spring where we make up the time.

Hong Kong: ‘Children’s time is split into 17 slots’

Iris Tse is a teacher at a primary school in Hong Kong

Our children start their day at 7.40am and lessons carry on until 3.30pm. The children have busy days, with their time split into 17 different slots. This time is used as a mixture of lessons, activities and breaks. There is a 20-minute recess in the morning, an hour for lunch, and a 10-minute break in the afternoon.

However, every day is timetabled slightly differently, and the breaktimes fall at different times, and will sometimes vary in length.

Our school is for primary-aged children, and we follow the state holiday schedule. The year is split into three three-month terms, and begins in the middle of August. We have a one-week holiday either in October or November, and again in February for Chinese New Year.

We have longer holidays over Christmas and Easter, three and two weeks respectively, and then six weeks at the end of June.

Our pupils learn many different subjects, and are all taught in Cantonese and English, as well as learning Mandarin. I teach maths and music to my pupils, but in addition to the lessons they learn in class, the pupils also take part in many different activities and clubs. It is expected that our children spend a lot of their own time in the evenings and weekends on these activities.

These sorts of activities vary depending on the pupils’ interests - it might be something like homework class or Chinese orchestra practice or team sports.

Australia: ‘No half terms here!’

Hannah Wright is a teacher at an all-through school in South Australia

If you look at a map of Australia, you’ll find the Eyre Peninsula at the end of the pointy bit that comes at the middle of the bottom. We’re a “remote area” school, and if you think that sounds like a tiny school in the middle of nowhere, well, you would be right.

Our school takes students from ages 5-18, but has just 153 in total. That said, our school shares many commonalities with other schools around the world: the school day begins and ends with attendance checks and announcements. The first bell rings at 8.55am, and there are seven lessons of 45 minutes, with the last bell ringing at 3.20pm.

Because we’re a remote school, we struggle to offer every subject to our older students. So, instead of learning in a traditional classroom, our older students attend online classes with other students across the peninsula (an area larger than the whole of Tunisia) and occasionally meet face to face with their teachers.

The school year runs for 40 weeks, and we have four terms: term one runs for 11 weeks, terms two and three are 10 weeks, and term four is nine weeks - no half terms here! Our holidays are two weeks between the terms, except our summer break over Christmas, which is six weeks.

Our students come from farming families. Although many take part in sports clubs, these aren’t school affiliated. Sports happen on the weekend because our children usually go home to their farming responsibilities in the evenings.

This article originally appeared in the 29 May 2020 issue under the headline “How do other countries organise their school day?”