Aproposal that short sharp language lessons, lasting just five minutes, be introduced in secondary schools grabbed the headlines last week during the announcement of a major shake up of the curriculum for 11 to 14-year-olds.

The uninitiated might wonder just how much – or little – French or German might be absorbed by children in such a short space of time, but according to a spokesman for the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which drew up the new curriculum, the five-minute proposal is all about flexibility and restoring the freedom to teachers to teach in a way that best suits their particular pupils.

There is no obligation on teachers to institute five-minute teaching sessions but “little and often” could work in some circumstances, said the spokesman. However, the move is controversial: Norbert Pachler, a modern languages learning expert and acting dean at the Institute of Education, says five minutes won’t be that useful in terms of attainment, but short, sharp sessions might act like tasters and pull children into language learning.

For Paul Kelley, educational innovator and charismatic American head of Monkseaton community high school in Whitley Bay, all the debate about the length of teaching sessions misses the point. From the outside Monkseaton looks like any other “bog standard” British comprehensive but neuroscience has been shaping what happens in its class-rooms for the past three years. In a new book, Making Minds, to be published tomorrow, Kelley (whose most famous former pupil, Laura Spence, made headlines when she was refused a place at Oxford only to be accepted by Harvard) explains how the latest knowledge about the way the brain works – and the biology of learning – could vastly improve what he has always regarded as an inadequate education system.

Why aren’t more schools trying to apply neuroscience’s recent breakthroughs to learning? Kelley says neuroscience papers generally don’t make for easy reading. In education, Kelley admits, we do things a particular way because that’s the way we’ve always done them. He’s always disliked the way politics, prejudice and received wisdom shape what goes on in schools.

He is particularly interested in the work of the American neuroscientist Douglas Fields, who claims that while the repetition of information is important in making memories stick, what is even more crucial is the breaks between repetitions.

It seems counterintuitive but to repeat information endlessly in a bid to commit it to memory is a pretty useless revision strategy. Fields’s experiments have shown that a permanent connection between brain cells will not be established unless cell synapses are allowed breaks from stimulation.

At Monkseaton half a year’s GCSE science course was recently condensed into an eight-minute Power-Point presentation for pupils doing module resits. The presentation was repeated three times – in slightly different ways – with 10-minute intervals in between. During the intervals, children played Simple Simon or Chinese whispers to distract their minds from the lesson.

Kelley says resits don’t usually bring a huge gain in performance but this new method significantly improved results. “It’s scary how well is works,” says Kelley. “Personally I’ve found it very difficult to accept the importance of the breaks because for 30 years I have been doing it the wrong way. It’s drilled into me that every second of the school day must be used actively.”

Kelley points out that if the new approach to learning and memory is right then we are wasting endless hours in schools on ineffective learning strategies. It’s time that could be spent on other activities. “A lot of time in schools is wasted – and a lot of time in work, too – because people can’t remember things,” he says.

Neuroscience has also informed Kelley’s push for language lessons in primary schools. “The neuroscience suggests that it is easier to learn a foreign language before the age of 12 or 13,” says Kelley. “After that the brain starts pruning back cells.” Following that line of thought there is no reason not to take children to GCSE language stage at primary school.

Monkseaton is also currently paying attention to what neuroscience has to say about teenage sleeping patterns. Kelley is intrigued by the work of Oxford neuroscientist Russell Foster, who has claimed that teens who cannot get out of bed in the morning are not lazy but in fact are struggling with a sleep pattern that is natural to their time of life. Foster says it is “cruel” to force teens to learn or work first thing in the morning. It is also a waste of time – they just do not learn well that early.

“Generally speaking, adults are timed to get up early and go to bed early but this isn’t true of teenagers,” says Kelley. “Their natural clock is set for get up late, go to bed late. Yet in the US, they make teens go to school even earlier than younger children. It actually amounts to sleep deprivation.”

The data on pupils’ sleeping patterns are still being gathered and analysed at Monkseaton but Kelley says that eventually pupils may be allowed to arrive, and leave, later. The teachers’ day, he promises, would remain the same, with staff meetings switched to mornings and students involved in supervised independent learning at the end of the day.

Pupils might be delighted: parents and teachers possibly less so. But Kelley believes that to keep the status quo despite the scientific evidence would be to stick with the old pernicious attitude in education that we do things a certain way because of tradition.

Is there any nervousness among Monkseaton parents that their children might be being used as guinea pigs? Kelley says no, adding parents have nothing to worry about because nothing is done on a whim. All innovations are based on strong evidence.

“You have to be very careful when you read the neuroscience research,” says Kelley. “And you have to have a neuroscientist on board telling you what is likely to work and what won’t. What I’m arguing for is applying what we know. Don’t let us allow the knowledge to just lie there.”

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