Children spend their days in different social settings: At home with their parents and families, at school or in after-school programs, youth clubs or during leisure-time activities. Not only the mushrooming of after-school institutions in urban areas, but also the increase in time children spend in those programs draw the attention of educational authorities (Rettinghaus & Haller, 2020). This led politicians, educational authorities, and school practitioners to propose the innovative concept of the “all-day school”. As political and pedagogical intervention, all-day schools aim at combining compulsory education and leisure time activities. This study examines how the various actors (students, parents, teachers, and principals) are affected by the deliberate structural and pedagogical changes brought about during the development of all-day schools.

In the city of Berne, the first all-day school was established in 2018 followed by three additional locations opening in 2020. The participation in the all-day school is voluntary, but when parents decide that their child attends it, the participation in lunch and after-school programs becomes mandatory. While all-day schools are an adequate response to needs of children and parents, not all municipalities and districts support this idea (Jutzi et al., 2020). In this context, we were interested in what children think about their “new school”, why parents voluntarily chose this option for their kids and to what extent the employees of all-day schools have adapted to new circumstances. We explored these questions during a larger research project intended to provide a systematic and critical outside view of the evolution of all-day schools in Berne and financed by the city’s educational authorities.

From a theoretical perspective, many factors influence organizational development on school level, such as the needs of the community, the efforts of teachers, school principals and educational authorities (Bryk, 2010; Hallinger & Heck, 2011). According to the dynamic approach to school improvement (DASI) by Creemers & Kyriakides (2015), effective schools combine both evidence-based and theory-driven approaches in their development projects. This means that policy makers use the knowledge and expertise of a variety of stakeholders such as teachers and staff, when planning school improvement projects. Gathering data from stakeholders is important to support the school development process and generate lessons learned as well as opportunities for improvement. For example to look at and document the well-being of children, which is widely considered to be an important prerequisite for their individual learning and development (Fend & Sandmeier, 2004; Hagenauer & Hascher, 2018). Yet, each school also follows an individual improvement trajectory, which highlights that context factors of the school – such as collective trust by community and parents, financial and moral support – play an important role in successful school improvement (Forsyth et al., 2011).

The study “Experience All-day School” focusses on the development of the all-day schools as a pedagogical and organizational innovation and how this offer affects children and their parents as well as teachers and principals. We use a comparative approach on school-level and look at differences and similarities among and between involved stakeholders. Accordingly, this paper focuses on the following questions:

How do different stakeholders in three school settings react to change?

1. How do the children experience the new daily routines at an all-day school?
2. In which ways does the all-day school influence the parent’s everyday life?  
3. How do employees (teachers and staff) perceive the new school situation?
4. What are the strategic goals of principals at management level?

In the city of Berne, three all-day schools opened in Summer 2020. In Fall 2020, we conducted interviews with principals, as well as focus group discussions with teachers and staff. In addition, we administered a written survey for all the students of the school (N=123) and their parents (N=80). The sample of School A contains 47 children aged 4-8 in two classes. School B contains 38 children aged 4-8 in two classes. The sample of School C contains 38 children in two classes. In the first class 23 children are 4-8 years old, while the 15 children in the other class are aged 9-12. In all three settings, about 40% of the children and a majority of the parents responding to the questionnaire (response rate 65%), are female and speak German as their first or second language at home. Moreover, the percentage of single parents is equal in all three schools (about 14%). One noticeable difference between schools concerns the parents who work part-time, ranging from 9% in school A to 23% in school B and 32% in school C. The five interviews with principals and six focus group discussions with all-day school teachers and staff particularly focused on their personal experience. The transcripts were analyzed using qualitative content analysis (Kuckartz, 2016). The parent’s and the children’s questionnaire include questions on their overall well-being in school and their daily routines (Hascher et al., 2011). Parents have answered structural and process variables (Stöckli et al. (2003). The quantitative cross-sectional data is analyzed with descriptive measures: frequencies, means and standard deviation of the sample. To illustrate the context-specific conditions of each school, we composed portraits of the three schools (Harland, 2014). In those case studies, we combine qualitative and quantitative data triangulation (Flick, 2011).

The goal of this study was to describe the influences of change on the different stakeholders in an innovative school development project in Switzerland. According to the theory of school development, we assume that all the stakeholders experience structural and pedagogical adjustments in everyday school life and that their opinions can also vary from school to school. The results show that children attending the all-day school stay together as a class with the same teachers and staff, including lunch time and afternoon activities. According to the questionnaire, children feel comfortable and enjoy going to school. The study further shows that parents see the combination of instruction and extracurricular activities as an advantage for organizing work and family life. From the point of view of teachers and staff, the main challenge is the lack of preparation time between lessons and activities. We document some of the reasons why the coordination of teachers and staff does not work equally well in all three schools. The interviewed principals support the innovative project because they value that the children can build lasting relationships with teachers and staff, which support learning and social behavior. Moreover, the contact between parents and school is more focused and enables continuous relationships as well. This research is particularly important since the development of all-day schools is still at an experimental stage. While the political agenda favors expanding the idea of all-day schooling, policy makers want to base their decisions also on stakeholder opinions about the scope und sustainability of the project. In case of a positive evaluation, political authorities will consider implementing the pilot project in other dis-tricts and locations.

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