Summer holidays should be longer

Im glad you get 6 weeks. My school get 4 as we moved 1 week to October to make that 2 weeks

I take it that you don't have to worry about childcare and have children that are easy to care for and have plenty of options of things to do.

Yes that wasnt an amusing comment at all.

@noblegiraffeI agree with longer holidays but what do you mean by “even Ireland”?

Oh hell no

in Spain - this used to be away from cities, school starts at 7am - home for lunch and midday heat

society has grown to slow at the hottest part of the day

that won’t happen in uk yet

This chart is skewed because it shows only the summer holidays, not the full holidays over the year which more or less are matching across Europe. Kids in Italy don’t have half term breaks in October, February and May and many people envy the UK calendar as the kids get to the holidays exhausted. There are actually talks in the Italian government to align the current calendar to a more spread out one.

I have lived in Spain and UK with school age children. I loved the Spanish long summer holidays BUT we don’t have the support or culture within the uk to make it work (unfortunately).

Holiday clubs in Spain were cheap if run by the school (you are talking a month for about 90 euros) and even the privately run sports clubs are about 25% of what they are in the UK.

Also, they don’t have any half terms or teacher training days (teachers are expected to complete these during the end of June). i actually like this approach - but they do bank holidays different so there were odd days dotted around so you never felt the terms were too long.

Unless there was a huge shift in how we see and fund childcare provision, it would never work here.

I agree it's definitely too long. I think it should be 4 weeks and add the extra holiday elsewhere. I was reading some research yesterday which found that children lose around 40% of information learned over the 6 week holiday. Having a shorter holiday would help to alleviate this and additionally having days added to the other holidays instead, might mean they are less tired other times of the year. I wish I could remember what journal it came from and I could share a link.

I don’t know how kids and teachers do it in those hot July months! I think if I lived there I’d have to keep kids off school in that weather. It’s torture.

You do know that most parents only get 2 weeks leave in the summer.

Teachers aren't paid for the school holidays, bar 5 weeks. They are paid pro rata. Tbh, teachers would leave in droves if the holidays were shorter, so that's a non starter.

I was born and raised in Italy. We only had about 3 weeks off during the year, and then a 3 months+ off for summer. The last day of school was usually around May 31st, and we’d go back between September 15th and 20th. This hasn't changed and it due to the extreme heat. It can reach up to 50 degrees making it nearly impossible to stay in school. My parents didn’t struggle with childcare because my mam was a housewife, but nowadays many working parents do struggle. Most rely on grandparents or summer clubs, as childminders don’t exist there. Personally, I think 6 weeks of summer holidays is more than enough!

Didn't you consider that before having children?
There are always parents who say there's too much holiday, what about work? But the holidays have been the same for years and you still make the choice to have children so you can't really complain about school holidays.

Jeepers teachers get long enough as it is.

Maybe not serious, but certainly very rude, even if it was in jest.

Maybe do some more fun things with them if you’re bored. Enjoy them while they are young. I’ll never understand why parents want less time with their children. We all had 6 weeks off when we were children, why take that away from your own children?

It’s an interesting thread - usually threads in the summer holidays say that they should be shorter.

Someone upthread said that ideally there wouldn’t be any half terms so the summer holidays could be longer. The problem is that many schools don’t want the children in for more than six weeks at a time.

It’s possible that if schools genuinely got to pick their holidays (subject to having a certain number of weeks - 13? - a year), the schools with a more affluent intake may choose a long summer holiday while those whose intake is poorer may choose to have more, shorter, holidays throughout the year. The problem with this (apart from cases where siblings are at different schools) is that the long summer holidays become a bit of a status symbol.

Someone else upthread said that parents at private schools don’t face consequences for taking them out of school - not true! They don’t get fined but they still have to share their attendance figures with the local authority. Taking children out of school is disruptive for the class.

Support staff don’t get paid for all the holidays so get 6 weeks of pay deducted. If you added 2 more weeks to the summer they would get 8 weeks pay deducted. It would not be worth working in a school.

It's a stupid idea. How will single parents possibly cover the cost of childcare? It would be dire for children living in poverty etc.

The thing is, the kids who really really need that extra support over the holidays don't usually have parents who care to organise it for them.

Not the teachers, miss Murphy, the kids.😁
Am aware that teachers work even when kids are not present!

@Bushmillsbabe that sounds amazing but let's be honest that is a postcode lottery. Many areas have nothing like that. and plenty of people are not able to volunteer for two days a week. It doesn't just take organisation it takes luck/ what's available locally (and I'm speaking as someone who does volunteer with children so I'm aware of the benefits it can bring to do that - I do it to help my own child as you do with yours - but that isn't a replacement for proper long term services for children) .

I actually really dislike the way HAF is run as well - it's very piecemeal -ie. random depending on who runs what each holiday lots of children can't just 'jump' into any old childcare - sadly for me as a working parent my 11 year old has never been able to do that due to her autism.

My duaghters two best friends quality for HAF and she doesn't - how sad that they can't all try some projects together.

It's run very un inclusively - ie./ this is a 'haf' project - so kids go tot it because its free not because they actually want to or their friends are going.

One exception to this is the amazing provision of adventure playgrounds - which exist in some cities and I k now that they are run with Haf woven through the provision ie. ALL children are welcome - and the HAF money ensures ALL Children that attend can be looked after and fed. This is far more inclusive - children don't feel like they are getting special. ';poor child' provision.

It really isn't true that with a bit of organising all parents could cover the whole summer.

Two weeks October and I think there's a day off in November IIRC. Two weeks off at Christmas too.

So apart from Sweden and Finland, all countries were in will be very hot in the summer months.