Every primary school in England will ring a bell every forty seconds from September, after the country's leading digital education expert ruled that no child should ever be required to focus for longer than one short video clip.
Under the plan, a single maths lesson will be broken into roughly sixty separate bells, each followed by a change of subject, a change of seat and a change of teacher. «We are simply giving children the classroom their brains already expect,» the expert said. «If a pupil manages to follow one full sentence, that is a sign the bell is running late.»
Teachers have been issued with stopwatches and a laminated card of approved transitions, including a two-second countdown, a colour change on the whiteboard and a brief burst of unrelated music. A lesson on the Tudors now lasts eleven bells, of which four are reserved for the question «any questions?» and seven for the answer.
By October, the bell will ring during break, during assembly and during the walk to the bus. By Christmas, the department expects pupils to arrive at secondary school able to hold a thought for almost a minute and a half, provided nobody speaks.