The four-day school week debate is sharpening in Australia, and a leading education neuroscientist is urging principals to keep one question at the centre: what happens to the learning?
Professor Ken Purnell, Head of Education Neuroscience at CQUniversity Australia, says growing interest in flexible school schedules is understandable given persistent workforce pressures. For school leaders fielding staff requests for flexible arrangements, however, his message is caution, not dismissal.
“It is not simply about whether a school operates over four or five days – it is about how much quality learning time students actually receive,” Professor Purnell said.
His remarks come as Queensland, Victoria, and the Australian Capital Territory each explore flexible scheduling models, shaped by different local contexts and staffing pressures.
What would a four-day school week look like in Australia?
The term covers very different arrangements. In the United States, NPR reported in 2025 that more than 2,100 public schools across 26 states were running some version of a four-day schedule. Students typically attend four days and the fifth is closed entirely.
Research there has shown mixed or modestly negative effects on student achievement, particularly in maths and reading. Outcomes are better when total instructional hours are maintained.
Australia’s emerging proposals look quite different. The Victorian branch of the Australian Education Union (AEU) has proposed a model in which each teacher’s timetable allows four days of face-to-face teaching. A fifth day would be set aside for planning, collaboration, and administrative work from home. Different teachers take different planning days so schools remain fully staffed for students all week.
Queensland has taken its own approach. The state’s Department of Education updated its flexible learning policy to allow modified operating hours. The department stated the changes were “not a green light to implement a four-day week.”
Is a four-day week really about workload?
The appeal of the four-day week is often framed as a workload solution, but the evidence suggests the relationship is more complicated.
Full-time classroom teachers in Australia report working a median of 50 hours per week during school term, according to the Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership (AITSL). An average of six hours is spent on administration and nine hours on lesson planning alone.
Professor Purnell says the risk of simply relocating rather than reducing that load is real. If the timetable shrinks but curriculum obligations, marking, and administrative demands do not, the structural problem remains unsolved.
“We also need to make sure that any compressed timetable does not simply squeeze the same amount of learning into longer, more demanding days,” Professor Purnell said.
For school leaders considering a flexible model, that means any proposal needs to map what happens to teachers’ actual hours, not just their days.
Designing a four-day school week for Australian conditions
Professor Purnell’s central argument is that Australia should not simply import models built for rural US districts.
“Australia can design models around the needs of students, teachers and families, then evaluate them properly against schools operating under conventional arrangements,” he said. “The question should not be whether a four-day week sounds attractive. The question should be whether a particular model produces better outcomes for students while also creating a sustainable environment for teachers.”
For Australian school leaders, the practical question is no longer whether flexibility is desirable. It is how to test any four-day school week model rigorously enough to know whether it works.