Ninety-five percent. That’s the share of students at Gossau Upper Secondary School in the canton of St. Gallen who chose to start school later when their schedule finally let them. The number is almost unanimous — and what followed it makes the case hard to dismiss.
The school introduced a flexible timetable three years ago, giving students a choice: arrive at 7:30am for optional learning modules, or begin regular classes at 8:30am. Under the previous system, the day started at 7:20am. That single hour of flexibility changed how much teenagers slept, how well they felt, and how they performed academically.
Researchers from the University of Zurich and the University Children’s Hospital Zurich tracked the shift by analyzing 754 student survey responses collected at two points — once under the old schedule, once a year into the new one. The students had an average age of 14.
What the Biology Actually Says
The problem with early school starts isn’t discipline or laziness. It’s physiology. During adolescence, the body’s internal clock shifts later, making it biologically difficult for teenagers to fall asleep at the same hour adults do. Because bedtime can’t easily be pushed earlier, an early alarm means less total sleep — and that deficit compounds across the school week.
“Chronic sleep deprivation not only affects well-being, but also has a measurable impact on mental health, physical development and the ability to learn,” says Oskar Jenni, a developmental pediatrician at the University of Zurich and one of the study’s authors.
Under the flexible schedule, students started their school day an average of 38 minutes later than before and woke up around 40 minutes later in the morning. Their bedtimes stayed largely the same. The result was direct: on school nights, they slept an average of 45 minutes longer.
Grades, Sleep Quality, and Well-Being
The extra sleep wasn’t just a comfort measure. Students reported fewer problems falling asleep and higher health-related quality of life. Lead author Joëlle Albrecht summarizes it plainly: “The students reported fewer problems falling asleep, and health-related quality of life increased.”
Academic outcomes shifted too. Compared with cantonal test benchmarks, students posted better results in both English and mathematics after the schedule change.
The findings appear in the Journal of Adolescent Health. According to the report, flexible start times — rather than a fixed later start — offer a practical mechanism because they let individual students align their day with their own biological rhythms without forcing a single schedule on everyone.
Fewer studies have examined flexible systems specifically, as opposed to a uniform shift in start time. The Gossau model provides a real-world test of what happens when teenagers are simply given the option to choose.
Photo by Andrew Neel on Unsplash
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