I had one of those horrendous moments this morning – when you wake, take a look at the clock and realize you’ve overslept. It was ten minutes after our children have to leave to catch the school bus.

Frantic flapping around and verbal abuse from all directions followed for a while.

Oversleeping’s not too much of a problem for me, with a walk down to the end of the house to start work, nor for my wife, who’s only five minutes from the school where she works, but for our teenage daughters it’s a real problem.

It doesn’t really matter why we overslept – the excuse is the sort most teachers would turn there nose up at. (If you must know, one daughter always sleeps through the alarm, but I hear it and wake her. The other usually does get up, but had been up at some unearthly hour the day before to go running before school, and was still recovering. She’d miss-set her alarm for 6.45pm. The alarm of last resort, the dog, had woken me up at 5am to be sick during the night, meaning she and I, both usually early wakers, had not surfaced at the normal time.)

(Don’t feel sorry for the dog. It was her own fault – she had managed to lay her paws on a whole loaf of bread that evening. To stretch the aside – query to any biologists out there. Why do dogs eat there own vomit? Given the idea is to expel something unwanted, it doesn’t seem a good survival trait.)

Which (finally) leads me to the point – why do secondary (junior high/high) schools start so early? I’m sure there has been research (anyone got a reference?) that showed teenagers function better mentally from mid-morning, yet our schools continue to start at a ridiculous time. In fact the school our teenagers go to recently moved their start time earlier to avoid finishing at the same time as the local primary school and clogging up the roads. It would have been so much better to have shifted the school times to later.

Compared to the US, I think we have relatively late start times already (ours is 8.45, so they have to go for the school bus around 8), but even so, isn’t it time we recognized the biological realities of teenage life?