Start school later and let children sleep longer

THE kids here are generally pretty smart and do particularly well in mathematics and science.

But recent information on widespread sleep deprivation among school-going children throws up the inevitable question: Could they perform even better if they just had more sleep?

Sleep experts say people who get insufficient sleep may appear to function normally, but their brains would not absorb and process information, or solve problems and make decisions as well as those who are well-rested.

Insufficient sleep can also stunt a child's physical growth, make him or her fat and cranky, and lead to medical problems such as diabetes.

American studies have found that even smart children score better when their school day starts later, giving them an extra half to one hour in bed.

So would letting children here sleep longer allow them to soak up information faster, and make even slow learners quicker on the uptake?

Theoretically, yes. It will not make children brilliant overnight, but if sufficient sleep resulted in a 1 to 2 percentage point improvement in performance, that would be a big jump.

Neurologist and sleep specialist Lim Li Ling certainly believes this. Looking back on her school days, she said: 'I went to medical school and did well. But I could have done better if I had had enough sleep. I was accomplished academically, but I could have been better emotionally.'

The main reason for sleep shortage here is the early start times in schools. Many children need to be up before 6am to get to school by the time the bell rings at 7:30am.

Some of them skip breakfast to get those extra precious minutes of snooze time, missing out on what dieticians say is the most important meal of the day.

While making them go to bed earlier may seem like a logical solution, sleep specialists say hormonal changes in teenagers keep them awake until fairly late - till 11pm or even after.

So even if they are packed off to bed earlier than that by their parents, they may not be able to fall asleep till later in the night.

So if children, especially teenagers, cannot get to sleep till very late at night, the only option left is to let them wake up later.

Early school start times are a legacy of a time when a shortage of schools here made it necessary to run two sessions per school to provide spaces for all school-going children.

This is no longer the case. Today, an increasing number of schools are becoming single-session.

But in spite of this, most still start classes pretty early for no reason other than difficulties in logistics: Many children get to school in school buses which have to ferry workers to factories after the school run.

Bus operators say that having a later start time for schools would disrupt their schedules, since they cannot very well ferry both sets of passengers at the same time.

The handful of schools that have bitten the bullet and pushed their start times by half an hour to 8am have encountered difficulties - their students still get in by 7am because bus operators have refused to budge on their schedules and lose their factory-worker passengers.

For these children, starting school at 8am merely means wasting an hour in school waiting for their other classmates to arrive.

Perhaps the answer is to start school even later - say, at 9am. That way, bus operators can ferry workers and then pick up kids for school.

A 9am start time would give children one hour more of sleep, and enough time to have breakfast and spend a few extra minutes with their parents who would also be getting ready to go to work at about the same time.

A later start time means school will end later, but this may not be such a bad thing: Many parents are not home from work when children get back from school now.

But the main advantage of making this change would be to allow this country's children to get enough sleep, so that their brains can work at peak capacity. We should not inhibit our children's potential - they are, after all, the nation's future - because of logistical difficulties.

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A 9am start time would give children one hour more sleep, time for breakfast and time with their parents who are getting ready to go to work.