Parents may not approve, but allowing teenagers to lie in could boost their exam results.
Late start times and playing music and games during lessons are potential ways of boosting academic performance.
With studies showing that the teenage body clock runs two to four hours behind the adult version, possible experiments include testing the effect of different school start times.
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, a neuroscientist at University College London, said that researching the timing of lessons shows ‘real promise’.
She told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: ‘The circadian rhythm – the body clock changes around the age of puberty.
‘We all know that before puberty, children are really wide awake and most alert first thing in the morning and get sleepy in the early evening and at puberty, that inverses, so that adolescents find it really hard to go a night.’
This adolescent ‘time shift’ persist until the age of 21, when the pattern starts to reverse and by the time we reach our 50s, we get out of bead as early as when we were young children.
Some schools have already experimented with early start times but it felt that that firm evidence that they are beneficial is lacking.
Research is already underway into whether weekend classes boost learning or sap energy.
Other possible ideas that could be put to the test include whether playing music or games in the classroom boosts brainpower and whether pupils would benefit from lessons being broken down into bite size chunks.
