On average teenagers are missing out on 10 hours of sleep per week due to having to start school early in the morning. This means that they are missing out on vital sleep which can lead to serious consequences such as limiting their ability to listen and concentrate forgetting important things such as names and homework dates, a lack of sleep can also contribute to many skin problems such as acne. It can also cause teenagers to become more aggressive towards friends, family, and teachers. Their diet is also affected, a lack of sleep can cause teenagers to eat unhealthily which leads to weight gain. Obviously, education is still very important and teenagers still need to be taught for around 6 hours a day but I think that starting school at 10 am would improve teenagers’ mental health mental and physical, increase their productivity levels and thus improve their exam performance.
Firstly, a teenager's body clocks work differently for adults and younger children, as they are unable to fall asleep as early meaning that they go to bed and wake up later, so it would surely make sense to start school at 10 am. Research findings featured in a National Sleep Foundation article show that teenagers have irregular sleep patterns on weekdays because neuroscientists have found that teenagers don’t begin to feel sleepy until about 10:45 pm, with their brains, not fully awake and attentive until between 9 am and 10 am so having them in school and in lessons, before teenagers are completely functional is absurd.
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Starting school at any time before 10 am also really affects pupils' sleep habits because it takes around 54 minutes on average for them to properly wake up, so many teenagers will arrive in school lethargic and unfocused because the average bedtime for UK teenagers is 11.30 pm, which is, assuming that their school starts at 9 am, not enough time to properly rest and wake up in time for school. Not only would starting school at 10 am work better with the teenager's body clocks it would also help with the teenager's mental health. Many scientific studies, such as Harvard medical school have shown that lack of sleep has a direct link to many of the leading mental health problems that plague teenagers today. Sleep deprivation affects both your psychological state and your mental health, various studies like neurocore’s have shown that up to 90% of people suffering from depression also suffer from some form of chronic sleep disorder.
One study, in particular from Anxiety Disorders that those with insomnia are four times more likely to develop depression than those who do not suffer from it. Depression causes a lack of concentration, and trouble remembering and retaining information all of these being skills that are used in school every day. A study by Donna Littlewood of the University of Manchester shows that if those suffering from depression have a short sleep duration or poor sleep quality are more to wake up with suicidal thoughts. Lack of sleep also causes students to be more anxious and stressed which not only affects their ability to cope with exams and school work but can also make someone physically unwell, a sickness which means that the student will miss out on important lessons and vital information that they will need to go to in order to get a good grade.
Stress can also lead pupils to stop trying and putting in less effort which will lead them to start failing classes. Lack of sleep can also have a massive impact on exam performance. If you do not get enough sleep you tend to react slowly which might mean pupils are unable to make fast decisions under the pressure and are therefore unable to complete the exam meaning they will get a lower grade. Students are more stressed out if they have less sleep which affects their ability to cope with the pressure of exams meaning they won't achieve what they are capable of because they are too anxious and they cannot focus on studying for the tests. The fact teenager's brains aren’t fully alert first thing in the morning means that they are unable to obtain the knowledge that they received in morning classes which can really affect them when in exams as they cannot remember this knowledge or they need to spend more time going over this out of school which takes away from revising other topics as they need to learn these ones again.
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Essay on Why Should School Start Later.
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