A new study conducted by Oxford University will see tens of thousands of secondary school students start school later in order to investigate whether it will have a positive impact on exam results.

In recent years neuroscience studies have proved that the typical teenager’s body clock differs from that of an adult’s, as teens are pre-disposed to fall asleep around midnight, and are not fully engaged with their studies until around 9 to 10am; around two hours after most adults.

The study, involving over 30,000 pupil participants across a hundred schools, and running over a four-year period, hopes to find whether timetabling school around the typical teenager’s circadian rhythms — the pattern of sleep— will improve their GCSE grades. Some pupils will have the opportunity to start at 10am, and will also be given education on the importance of getting sufficient sleep in personal, social and health education lessons.

Neuroscientists say that the ‘out of sync’ teenage body clock can affect some individuals up to the age of 19 in females and 21 in males, meaning that it may also affect many University students.

Speaking to Cherwell, Angela Stephen, a biochemistry student at Oxford University said, “if there was the option to start an hour later, it would enable me to work later into the night. I think that my brain is more active as the day goes on – I work better then, and so a later start would actually be more productive for me.”

Biological factors are not the only ones to blame for the ‘out of sync’ clock. Professor Russell Foster, Director of the Oxford University Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, said “this biology, along with the impact of social media and other sociocultural influences, delays bed and wake times and greatly shorten sleep.”

The study is led by Oxford’s Professor Colin Espie, who commented, “our grandparents always told us that sleep is very important, but it’s only recently that we have started looking at the neuroscience of sleep. We know that something funny happens when you’re a teenager, in that you seem to be out of sync with the world. Your parents think it’s because you’re lazy and opinionated and everything would be okay if you could get to sleep earlier. But science is telling us that teenagers need to sleep more in the mornings.”

He added, “society’s provision for learning is school, but the brain’s is sleep. So we’re explorong the possibility that if you delay the schools start time until 10am, that will improve learning performance.”

The effect of beginning students’ studies later in the day has been previously investigated. In 2009, Monkseaton School in North Tyneside took part in a pilot study that found that starting school just one hour later improved grades by up to 19% in core subjects.

However, the school returned to starting at 8.50am after head teacher Paul Kelley’s departure, suggesting that it may take time before the results are widely accepted. Paul Kelley is now an associate at Oxford University’s Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute.

The study is part of several that are looking at ways of improving student’s academic performance. Another study being conducted by both Oxford and Oxford Brookes Universities is investigating the impact of physical education on Year Eight pupils’ classroom work, as in many cases students are not active during 50% of their Physical Education lessons.

The results of the sleep study will be published in 2018.

An Oxford tour guide is protesting on Broad Street against Oxford City Council and Visit Oxfordshire over what he claims to be a monopoly funded by taxpayer money.

Alasdair de Voil, known locally and to tourists as the “Mad Hatter”, claims that Visit Oxfordshire do not offer unbiased or impartial information on walking tours in Oxford and that council tax is being used to prop up a monopoly and undermine local tour guide operators.

He believes that Visit Oxfordshire gives preferential treatment to the tour run by the Guild of Guides, which he says does not pay the fee of £360 plus VAT a year for the partnership scheme to which tour guides in the city can join for standard membership.

This membership includes benefits such as having leaflets on display in the Tourist Information Centre on Broad Street.

Mr de Voil says that this is a private company and yet is funded by £250,000 per annum in council tax funds.

He claims that 98% of the adverts on their website are for their own “official” tours, despite not paying the partnership fee. Due to this, he believes that Oxford City Council and Visit Oxfordshire are unfriendly, inept and corrupt.

He said, “The visitor information centre does not operate for or on behalf of either the interests of independent tour operators or the general public.

“If the visitor centre were run fairly and professionally without their own blatantly gross conflict of interest to do not much else than market their own selected ‘Official Oxford walking tour’, then the marketplace would be much more accessible to us.

“Like nearly all other enterprising local individuals who have paid Visit Oxfordshire a partnership fee, we are extremely unhappy with how Visit Oxfordshire delivers the visitor information service- which is supposedly a public function tendered to them by the local council.

“Tour operators like myself have paid them partnership fees and seen almost no return on investment at all. We have also sent random people inside to check out what their staff are telling the public. They usually won’t tell you about any other tours unless you ask them to do so and because the centre’s signage and windows and reception counters only offer you one choice, most people never realise to ask otherwise.

“In any business, one has competition and as guided tours is an unregulated industry, there’s also unfortunately lots of false advertising dominating our marketplace opportunity today too.

“Oxford’s small businesses are struggling enough without having to compete with a publicly funded public service, whose remit, almost anyone would have assumed, is to support and benefit businesses like ours. Instead, we have to compete with them. This is not fair and it’s corrupt use of public money to be propping up a monopoly interest.”

Giles Ingram, chief executive of Visit Oxfordshire, said in response to the allegations, “We are not in any way corrupt and we are very open in the way our policies and procedures work, which have been examined and all been found to be above board. We have been totally above board in all our dealings.

“Our website reflects our policies and the way in which we work, which again has been scrutinised thoroughly by exterior bodies. All of these issues have been set out in our policies.”

He said in regards to the Guild of Guides not paying the partnership fee “They do subscribe.”

A quality charter has been introduced on the recommendation of the Local Government Ombudsman to which all tour operators have been asked to sign up and all other recommendations have been met in full.

He reiterated that Visit Oxfordshire had been unable to come to an agreement with Mr de Voil and he has been offered a refund of his membership.

An investigation is underway at Keble after a group of former members of the Keble rugby team attended a college bop and behaved in an inappropriate and sexist manner. Some of the offenders have since been banned from any similar occasions in future.

The bop took place after the annual match between old and new members of the Keble rugby team, and all the inappropriate behaviour is thought to have been caused by the old members.

Shortly after the bop, the JCR’s Welfare Officers circulated an email stating, “We are writing to you about the events of the bop on Saturday night. It has come to our attention that some of the ex-members (“Ghosts”) who were present behaved inappropriately. This behaviour is unacceptable and an anomaly at Keble.”

The email continued, “If you were made to feel uncomfortable in any way at the bop, please contact a member of the Welfare Team…the college is fully supportive and wants to create a safe environment for its students.”

Meanwhile, JCR President Rosie Petersen commented, “Up until this year
there have not been any incidents which have resulted in these kinds of
complaints. The complaints that have been made about the behaviour of the alumni at the bop are highly unsettling,and action is being taken.

“We are putting in place welfare provisions with the co-operation of the welfare team, the decanal team, and the peer supporters to make sure that anyone who was affected by the incident gets the support that they need.”

Referring to actions which Keble JCR would take in future to prevent a repeat of these events, she added, “We are also looking into solutions for the future, with the options of either changing the timings of the bop or the rugby match, or just ensuring that the alumni are out of the bar before the bop gets underway.

“The alumni whom we have already been able to identify have been banned from future similar events, and we are working to ensure that all of the offenders are identified. We also strongly encourage people to report serious incidents to the police.”

A Keble student who wished to remain anonymous told Cherwell, “I was at the bop and I remember seeing some older guys around that I didn’t recognise. I thought they looked a bit dodgy, but I didn’t speak or interact with them.”