Thousands of 14-16-year-olds are to be given the chance of a lie-in and a later start to the school day to assess the impact on their educational achievement as part of a mass research project. Pupils will be allowed to start lessons at 10am and will learn about sleep as part of their personal, social and health education curriculum.

The study, which aims to synchronise start times with adolescent biology, is one of six projects in a £4m research programme funded by the Wellcome Trust and the Education Endowment Foundation. It aims to investigate ways in which neuroscience might improve teaching, learning and exam results in the UK.

According to neuroscientists, teenagers’ circadian rhythms – the cycle of sleep and wakefulness – typically begin two hours after those of adults, so current school start times mean they wake up too early and are trying to focus when their body still needs sleep.

Colin Espie, a professor of sleep medicine at Oxford University, said: “We know something funny something happens when you’re a teenager. You seem to be slightly out of sync with the rest of the world. Of course, your parents think that’s probably because you’re a little bit lazy and opinionated and if only you got to bed early at night, you’d be able to get up in the morning.

“But science is telling us in fact there are developmental changes during the teenage years which lead to them actually not being as tired as we think they ought to be at normal bedtime and still sleepy in the morning. What we’re doing in the study is exploring the possibility that if we actually delay the school start time until 10am, instead of 9am or earlier, that additional hour taken on a daily dose over the course of a year will actually improve learning, performance, attainment and, in the end, school leaving qualifications.”

The £700,000 project, which will involve 106 schools and almost 32,000 teenagers, follows a pilot study carried out at Monkseaton high school in north Tyneside in 2010. Dr Paul Kelley, who now works as a research associate at Oxford University’s Sleep and Circadian Neuroscience Institute, which is leading the new project, was head teacher at the time. After a decade of researching all the available evidence, he decided to put the start of the school day back to 10am over a two-year period. The impact was profound.

“There were very positive outcomes, both academic and in terms of health,” said Kelley. “Academic results went up, illness down and the atmosphere in school changed. The students were not only much nicer to each other, they were much nicer to teachers. It was bliss.”

Following the experiment, which was tracked in a BBC Horizon programme, GCSE results at Monkseaton went up from 34% of pupils scoring five A*-C grades including English and maths, to 53%; the same results went up even more sharply for disadvantaged students, from 12% achieving five A*-C with English and maths to 42%. “It’s hugely more effective as an educational intervention in terms of raising achievement and health than any alternative,” said Dr Kelley. “I should have done it sooner. Nothing I had ever done in all my teaching made such a difference.”

Dr Hilary Leevers, head of education and learning at the Wellcome Trust, said: “Our growing understanding of how the brain acquires and processes information has great potential to improve teaching and learning. We know that many teachers are keen to try new approaches based on neuroscience; however, we have so far lacked evidence about what will actually be beneficial to their students.”

Another of the neuroscience education projects has grown out of research which suggests that learning improves when linked to an uncertain reward. This study, to be run in 81 schools using 12,150 pupils, will test the impact of game-based rewards in year-eight science classes; pupils will compete in teams to gain points by answering questions correctly, but they will then be given the chance to spin a “wheel of fortune” that could see them end up with more points, or none.

Dr Paul Howard Jones of Bristol University, who is leading the project, said: “We know answering questions in class is important for students’ learning but, based on our understanding of the brain’s reward system, we will be encouraging all students to continuously answer questions as part of a game. Games in the classroom may do more than just make learning fun. Evidence suggests they can stimulate the brain’s reward system in ways that accelerate learning.”

A third study by Oxford University and Oxford Brookes University, which arises out of neuroscience research on the beneficial effects of aerobic exercise on brain function,. It will examine whether increasing the amount of physical activity year-eight pupils do during PE lessons has an impact on their work in the classroom.

A Birkbeck University project will develop and test software that aims to improve primary pupils’ ability to “inhibit” irrelevant prior knowledge to help them acquire new knowledge successfully.

A “spaced learning” study led by the Hallam Teaching School Alliance will see lessons broken up with different activities. It is based on evidence from cellular experiments in neuroscience which suggest that connections between neurones are strengthened if a stimulus is repeated several times with intervals of activity.

A Cambridge University-led project will test a new computer programme designed to improve pupils’ literacy.