Nanjing High Schools Are Letting Students Sleep In — and Parents Are Cheering

Students at several Nanjing high schools are getting an extra half hour of sleep, and the change is making national news. Multiple senior high schools in the city have pushed back their morning arrival times to between 7:10 and 7:20, according to reporting by the Yangzi Evening News, which confirmed the new schedules with schools and parents this week. At one school in the city's Jiangning district, students previously had to be at their desks by 6:40 for a day that ran until 9:30 in the evening; they now arrive at 7:15 and finish evening study at 9:20. Another parent in the Gulou district reported the same pattern — start moved to 7:10, evening session ending at 10 minutes past 9.

The trigger was a parents' outcry. Complaints had circulated that some students were spending more than 15 hours a day on campus, a schedule that left children waking in the dark and returning home after bedtime. Jiangsu Province's education department chief publicly responded, saying student health was a priority and that the province had issued explicit requirements on school hours this year among five areas of school management, with tighter supervision to follow.

The half-hour is modest, but the reaction it produced is not. Under the hashtag "Nanjing high schools push back school start times," parents posted before-and-after timetables and reported the effects: "My kid's head is clearer in the morning, and his energy is different," one Jiangning mother told the Yangzi paper. Another parent, at a school that had moved only its evening study period ten minutes earlier, noted the mood lift nonetheless: "Early finish, early sleep — the kid's in a good mood."

The response also shows how the argument about China's grueling school hours is normally framed. One post, widely shared by educators, took the occasion to argue that the adjustment doesn't go far enough — that between 7:15 and 9:20 the day is already fully saturated with high-intensity study, and adding more hours produces no learning gains. Its author, a school principal writing under a pen name, called for a daily period of light physical exercise, and argued that families should aim for a solid but not obsessive gaokao score, since the real pressure point comes later: "If everyone is aiming for civil-service exams anyway, 500 points gets you into a decent university — there's no need to grind for twelve straight years."

That comment gestures at the system this tweak sits inside. Chinese high schoolers are preparing for the gaokao, the national college entrance exam whose scores largely determine university admission, and the resulting schedules — 15-hour campus days, evening study sessions, weekend classes — are normal across the country. The "double reduction" policies of recent years formally restricted tutoring and homework loads in primary and middle school, but high school has been the harder frontier, since the exam itself hasn't changed.

What makes the Nanjing move worth watching is that it came from the provincial education department rather than from individual schools, and that it explicitly cites student health. If other provinces follow, the shift would be a data point in a slow-moving reconsideration of what the Chinese school day is for. For the parents in Nanjing, the stakes are more immediate: twenty minutes of morning sleep, and a child who arrives at his desk — at 7:20, not 6:40 — with a clearer head.