School Days

As so often with these things, I am totally out of touch with modern Britain. My first reaction, on seeing Michael Gove's proposal to lengthen the school day, so that instead of ending at 3pm it ends at 4.30pm was surprise that it was so short at the moment. The reason for this is also why I'm not sure what the hell Christine Blower is on about either:

"Independent schools in England and Wales, which often break for two weeks more during the summer and have longer holidays at other times of the year than their state counterparts, do not apparently feel the need to change and are apparently not suffering from their reduced hours."

My schoolday pretty much throughout my education started at between 8.15 and 8.30 and went on until 6. That sort of timetable allowed a lot of time for sport/extra-curricular activities as well - between 2 and 4 hours a day at secondary school. An extra three hours a day for eleven years adds up to an awful lot more education...

UPDATE: Recusant makes the point in the comments that his (and my) schools also taught on Saturday mornings (I'll leave out the sport in the afternoons, because they were only for children in the school teams). Remarkably, this means that private school weeks are effectively three days longer than state school weeks. I wonder just how much of the gap in educational attainment is explained by that?