课间十分钟，没有的：英国小学生的一天

Chinese parents picture the English primary school as relaxed. Dr Zhihao Yan, on placement in a south London state school where nearly 70% of pupils are on free school meals and under 20% were born in Britain, reports a day that is tightly packed: one fifteen-minute break between 8:40 and noon, an afternoon that runs from one o'clock to 3:10 with nothing in between, and almost no homework before Year 3. The lightness is real but it is on the other side of the school gate — the work has been compressed into the lesson rather than sent home. Break and lunch, by contrast, are untouchable: teachers may not take them, and a child made to wait a minute in the lunch queue cried. And reading is deliberately not framed as homework. It is framed as a reward, and set daily from Year 1.