The change to a 10-week term had been brought up recently, and surveying the teachers we found 9 teachers who supported this extension of the SPLC term from the regular 8 weeks. On 22 November 2023, we surveyed all the students of these 9 teachers, and here are the results:

And here are the comments submitted:

• Depending on the wishes of my teacher
• Yes
• 8 weeks makes it easier to plan for other contingencies eg travel, medical appointments
• Makes sense to align it with the school terms
• 8 weeks allows for going away out of school term without losing too many lessons - helpful if, as a retired ‘student’ you need to be careful with costs. Thank you for asking!
• I am happy either way, but note one disadvantage of increasing the class duration is that it is difficult to make a longer commitment.
• 10 weeks becomes expensive,
• I find 4x weeks tends to be too long between terms
• Love 10x weeks; ta.
• The longer term will give more opportunity to develop high quality projects.
• I find this format suits me, but happy to go with the status quo
• The longer the terms, the better. The vast majority of people seem to be retired so I don't think long breaks between terms are needed.
• Definitely only 8 weeks. If you start making the classes too long and expensive people won't want to come. It also gives more scope for shorter classes during the break. Eg poetry, print making discussion groups
• I prefer 8 weeks "term" but I will hapilly go along with 10 weeks.
• I would actually prefer to revert to the 9 week term we used to have. However I prefer 10 weeks to 8 weeks.
• Ten weeks gives us a better opportunity to learn Spanish.
• I think it would be a good idea to have the 10 week terms but perhaps the last term of the year should always be 8 weeks as a lot of people go on holiday then. Just a thought.

A big thank you to those who participated!

We have decided that the results are not overwhelmingly skewed enough to abandon the SPLC 8-week status quo. However, we will do some more granular surveying in Term 1, in view of Term 2. For each class, if teachers and all students are unanimous on moving to 10 weeks, we will make the changes for these specific classes.