Sleepy Time: Spanish kids and education

"It's often past midnight, well past midnight and you can hear the boy and what's probably a TV. This isn't just weekends by any means. And then you can hear them getting up at seven the next morning. Maybe he has a siesta, but if not, he's surely suffering from sleep deprivation. It can't be good. And it's been like this for some years. He's fourteen now, but it was a similar pattern when he was much younger."

This is the drift of what I was told by someone (English) who lives in a semi and whose neighbours are Mallorcan. Being a semi, you can hear something of what goes on next door and you are aware of people being up late. It is only one story, but how typical is it? How normal is it for Spanish kids (and indeed kids from other nationalities) to be up until past midnight and to seemingly get too little sleep? Quite normal, you might tend to think.

The broadcaster Telecinco has been criticised for showing "La Voz Kids", the children's version of "The Voice", between 10pm and 1.25am on Thursday nights. The average viewing figure for the show was 5.1 million in all. When the final was broadcast, ratings data suggested that over 300,000 viewers were children. They may not all have watched to the end, but you would guess that most did. 

Spanish TV programmes have a tendency to go on for an inordinately long time. Partly this is because of interminable and regular ad breaks. Partly it is because they are simply over long. Put these two factors together and you get a show that lasts for almost three and a half hours, one that doesn't start until 10pm on a weekday. If you take my anecdote, then you can add other examples of late broadcasting which are keeping children awake into the early morning.

Television is only element. It's a cultural thing, so the justification goes. We are all familiar with the sight of children being up and around late in Mallorca. It is nothing unusual. But is it good for them? Has this cultural fact of life been a contributory factor in educational underperformance, something which is more acute in Mallorca and the Balearics than in most other other parts of Spain?

Towards the end of 2012, the Spanish Institute for Sleep Research launched a campaign called "I Have a Dream". It was designed to promote better sleeping habits among children. What the institute was mainly concerned with were the health consequences of inadequate sleep - obesity and the development of diabetes - but it also considered educational performance and the effects of late-night TV watching and computer screen use. Its director was in doubt that fewer hours of sleep plus the wrong signals being sent to the brain by this late-night viewing were contributing to attention deficit syndrome. He said that 60% of Spanish children got less sleep than is recommended, that 30% displayed symptoms of daytime sleepiness, that there had been an ongoing tendency since the mid-1980s for children to go to bed later and that two-thirds of kids between the ages of ten and fifteen made the decision themselves as to what time they went to bed.

Research published in 2011 studied sleep among children from the ages of two to nine in different European countries. It found, among other things, that the percentage of children in, for instance, Germany, who slept between ten and eleven hours was almost 28%. For Spain, the percentage was under 5%. But other international research, published last year by the Boston College in the US, showed that, for maths teaching, Spanish teachers reported that 38% of pupils suffered from a lack of sleep. This was a comparatively low percentage. A higher one was for Finnish pupils. 60% of them suffered from lack of sleep, and yet maths performance is very much higher in Finland than Spain.

A conclusion that was drawn from the Boston research was that the use of phones and computers (to which could be added TVs) late at night was resulting in the lack of sleep and was a particular problem in more affluent countries. Does this mean, therefore, that Spain is a comparatively less affluent country?  

Drawing firm conclusions as to the relationship between sleep and the school performance of Spanish children is difficult because of apparent contradictions between these different pieces of research. And in any event, does research for Spain as a whole equate to the situation in Mallorca?

It may be right to criticise broadcasters, but before people get too critical or draw inaccurate conclusions, perhaps there ought to be thorough research into the sleep of children in different parts of Spain and the relationship with school performance. Only then might it be possible to say for sure that Mallorcan kids need more sleep or don't.

Treading On Balearics' Educational Performance

It's not quite like the anticipation of waiting to hear who has won an Oscar or which countries England have drawn in the World Cup finals, but anticipation there was ahead of the announcement of this year's PISA (Programme for International Student Achievement) survey, published for the first time since 2009 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It might be said, however, that there was a similar sense of impending doom to that surrounding England's draw for those countries which knew full well that they were far from being seeded and were languishing in the educational international rankings league. Spain, unlike its football team which can look forward with optimism to the World Cup draw, was bracing itself for the worst. Though the Spanish media has suggested that the PISA results show a slight improvement in educational standards, the actual text of the PISA report says otherwise. Mean performance since 2003 remains below average in the key areas of mathematics, science and reading comprehension and is not improving. Indeed, the report suggests that despite improvements in student socioeconomic status since 2003 there is a negative trend in performance.

There has been, you might have noticed, a fair amount of recent interest in education both nationally in Spain and in the Balearics. The new national education bill was introduced and greeted with widespread criticism and protests. The introduction of the Balearic Government's trilingual teaching (TIL) programme has been an utter disaster and is likely to become more rather than less disastrous. 

TIL, many appear not to have noticed, has taken the spotlight off what really matters in Balearic public education: its performance. Governmental spin might suggest that TIL is the solution to performance ills, but it has made this suggestion while ignoring a fundamental issue - just why is this performance so bad? The government has made no attempt to address this. All it has done has been to bring in a highly questionable solution of flagship educational reform without tackling the underlying problem.

PISA ranks 65 countries' performance. It also details performance within regions of countries. The Balearics remains in the bottom four in each of the three key areas. It shares the dunces' corner with Murcia, Andalusia and Extremadura. This continuing underperformance is shocking not just because performance remains stubbornly poor in the Balearics but also because the Balearics is an altogether wealthier region than the likes of Extremadura. If general economic performance is supposed to equate to educational performance, then the Balearics is proof that it doesn't.

The estate agent Joana Maria Camps, who just so happens to be the Balearics education minister, stoked up the anticipation for the latest PISA survey results by speaking in the Balearic Parliament the other day about PISA. Or rather, she didn't speak about PISA. Some of you might know that there is a Spanish verb "pisar" which means to tread on. As such, this verb has nothing whatsoever to do with the PISA survey. There is a Catalan verb "trepitjar" which also means to tread on. Somehow, the estate agent managed to mistake PISA for the Spanish verb and then translate it into the Catalan verb. "Trepitja," she said. More than once. Parliamentary deputies, it is understood, were in fits of laughter.

You might say that this was a simple enough mistake, and if you were an estate agent who knows nothing about education, then it probably would be. If, however, you are meant to be a minister for education, it is more than just a mistake. It is an embarrassing howler of such gargantuan size that you should be shamed into returning to selling flats. Not Joana, however. It was, after all, only an error.

While Joana has womanfully been helping to tread on ("trepitjar" or "pisar", depending on your free selection of teaching language) common sense and trample it into floors of Balearics classrooms by insisting on an educational policy that defies common sense, she has failed to respond to the finding that a mere 18% of secondary school children are able to understand English sufficiently well enough to receive oral instruction, i.e. be taught in English. It may, though one can't be certain, that this 18% includes at least some children with one or two English-speaking parents. Furthermore, there has been no good explanation offered as to why testing of English ability has only now been done.

The part of the PISA report which deals with Spain speaks of low morale among teachers. "One in four students in Spain attends a school where the principal reports low teacher morale, compared with one in ten students across OECD countries." The report doesn't detail morale levels by region, but it is not difficult to conclude that in the Balearics this morale might be lower still and is only getting lower along with educational performance, as determined by PISA or "trepitja".