The continuous school day reduces fertility in Spain, according to a study

Spain closed 2024 with 1.1 children per woman according to the National Institute of Statistics (INE), the lowest fertility in Europe and one of the lowest in the world, and has been testing natalist policies for two decades with ambiguous results on the number of births. These include everything from the baby check to the successive extensions of permits, including a large number of regional and local aid. Meanwhile, an organizational decision that is not usually conceived as family policy was advancing from school to school in the opposite direction. It is about the continuous school day, an educational policy that compresses classes between 9:00 and 14:00 and that was not born from any pedagogical design, but from a union battle in the public schools of the Canary Islands at the end of the 80s, from where it has spread throughout almost the entire country at the expense of the split day, which kept students in the center until 16:00 or 16:30 with lunch in between.

Its expansion has been as silent as it is uneven. The Canary Islands in 1990 and Extremadura in 2001 imposed it by law in all their public schools, while the rest of the communities left the decision in the hands of the votes of each school council, a gradual process that has made it the majority model in almost the entire country, to the point that, according to microdata from the Living Conditions Survey (ECV), more than 70% of students from 3 to 12 years old today have a school day of 30 hours per week or less. The pandemic only accelerated the process, increasing the implementation from 51% to 71% of the centers according to a survey carried out by EsadeEcPol, so that only Catalonia and the Basque Country today maintain split days as a general rule.

Despite its importance, it is one of the educational policies for which there is less evidence, both in terms of its effect on families and students. The effect on families may not be minor, since going from a split day to a continuous day is equivalent to withdrawing between two and three hours a day of free public child care just in the time slot in which the majority of parents continue to work. A new study published by Álvaro Muñíz-Fernández in the Journal of Policy Analysis and Management therefore treats the school day as what it is in practice, an implicit subsidy for childcare, and offers the first estimate of its effect on birth rates in the regions that experienced a greater expansion of the continuous day in the last decade.

The key to the study is that the expansion of the continuous day constitutes a quasi-natural experiment, since the autonomous communities adopted it at different times and with different intensities, which allows the construction of a counterfactual scenario, that is, to draw what would have happened to the fertility of the affected provinces in a world without change of day, and to make the comparison against that scenario. To do this, the author uses provincial data from the INE between 1981 and 2016 and the difference-in-differences method, a reference method in the evaluation of public policies.

The results are overwhelming. In the group of provinces that implemented the continuous day, the effect was a reduction in fertility by 0.12 children per woman, 9% compared to the level prior to the reform, and delayed the arrival of the first child by around four months, an effect that also does not exhaust in the short term, but rather accumulates over time. Intensity also matters, because where the reform was mandatory and reached all centers at the same time, in Extremadura, the drop reached 0.38 children per woman and the delay in motherhood was close to seven months, compared to more moderate effects in regions where adoption was voluntary and gradual and, therefore, not all families were exposed to the new schedule.

The most revealing detail is in which children they stopped having. The effect of the continuous day was smaller on the first births, where its impact was not statistically significant, but it did increasingly reduce the second, third and fourth children, exactly the same pattern shown by the fall in the Spanish birth rate in recent decades, in which the first children resist while the second and third children do not stop falling.

Why does school schedule affect a decision as important as having a second or third child? The answer lies in who was able to avoid the change and who was not. In the regions where the day was voted on school by school, enrollment in public schools fell 4.6 points after the reform, a sign that a part of the families, precisely those with more resources, escaped to private and subsidized centers that maintained split days or afternoon services, while in Extremadura, where private school was barely an affordable alternative in two of the poorest provinces in the country, no one could avoid the new schedule and the effect was maximum. Added to this is that the delay in motherhood is concentrated in the provinces where fewer women worked, with almost eight months of delay compared to just over two in those with greater female labor participation, which indicates that the underlying problem is the difficulty of making employment compatible with parenting.

This cost had already been documented for Spain by an EsadeEcPol study with microdata from the INE's Living Conditions Survey (ECV). In 91% of households, those that do not use care services, having children full-time is associated with a loss of 1,850 gross euros per year for mothers compared to 970 for fathers, a penalty that escalates to 3,550 euros among mothers with higher education and which, added for the country as a whole, its authors estimate at 8,048 million euros per year, with 66.4% of the cost borne by the mothers. Raising children in a world of continuous work became more expensive in time and money, and families responded accordingly.

Spain has dismantled, with a surprising lack of public debate on the matter, one of its most powerful pro-family tools, all while multiplying financial aid for births with dubious or outright zero results. And none of this has yet entered the educational debate about the school day, which continues to expand each spring through votes in which teachers, their main labor beneficiaries, defend that the model is better for students, an argument that the available evidence simply does not support.

The implication of public policy is uncomfortable but clear, full-time education is not only a question of conciliation or academic performance, it is also demographic and labor policy, the budgetary cost of which could be largely offset by the improvement in the labor income of parents, generating a positive and fair situation for both families and teachers. However, as long as the debate remains anchored in non-existent evidence about its academic effect and there is no desire to admit that it entails a direct cost for families, it is difficult to conceive a recovery of full-time education in Spanish schools.