For twenty years this school ran a morning session and an afternoon session, because there were nine classrooms and fourteen classes. Every child got about four and a half hours a day and every teacher taught the same lesson twice to different children.
Four classrooms were built along the north wall over fourteen months, and the school moved to a single session at the start of the following year.
What it changed. Every child now has the full day, half past seven until quarter past one. The afternoons are free, which is where the nine clubs came from. Teachers plan once and teach once, and the difference in the quality of a lesson by the eleventh week of term is obvious to anybody who has taught both ways.
What it cost. Classes are bigger. In the two session years a middle grade class was twenty one; it is now twenty eight. That is a real loss, we do not pretend otherwise, and the class teacher system and the support room were both strengthened in the same year specifically to answer it.
The building also gave the island a hall that seats three hundred, which is now used for examinations, for the parent meetings, for the association's stalls and as the cyclone shelter for the western end of the island.
