8:50/9am start is quite typical on the UK, from primary on. It seems to work.

When do people usually start work in the UK?

9am

Where I went to school (New England, USA) it was done the other way around. Elementary school started at 9am, middle school was earlier, and high schools were even earlier. That schedule didn't make a whole lot of sense to me.

Employers drive that phenomenon. They want teenagers available for work earlier in the afternoon.

Thoughts on this format? Cafeteria open at 6am, Homeroom from 7 - 9, classes requiring your brain to be awake after that.

That seems like a really long day. I didn't have a daily homeroom, how many hours of classes are included in that? I would feel awful for any child that gets dropped off at 6am, sits in a cafeteria for an hour, sits through 2 hours of homeroom and then 8 hours of classes.

That's also probably only going to work for highschool aged kids. The reality is that they're probably capable of getting themselves to school if you have to leave early

It is not mandatory. Our school has similar system and kids spend that time playing. They dont just sit on chair. There is one teacher to supervise a group of kids, if there are too many kids the group gets split into two.

For teenagers, 10-18 or 11-19 would probably be best, including time allocated for homework.

Sounds like work needs to be more flexible. There's enough people without kids to cover those earlier hours.

Except the few places without public transportation, most parents don't have to take their kids to school. Starting later would probably help with overprotective parents.

Are school buses not a thing anymore? The suburb I grew up in definitely didn't have a remotely decent public transit system but the school district was required (along with all public school districts in the state of Texas IIRC) to provide a school bus that stopped within a few minutes' walk of every student's home (probably with exceptions for people who actually lived outside of the school boundaries and applied to transfer in). In high school, classes started after 9am and it all seemed to work just fine.

No, they aren't really in many places. Our district runs a couple routes with limited stops, but nothing like I remember growing up 40 years ago.

You don’t always have to bring them there, but young kids do need help with getting ready for school.

Depending on where you live, it's probably not safe (and maybe even forbidden) to let young children (<10 years) go to and on public transportation alone.