Summer holidays should be longer

My colleague has a child in Private School (day only not boarding) and childcare is an absolute nightmare for her!

She has to ask her Parents to stay with her when her child breaks up from school in the summer holidays to look after him while she and her husband both work.

£250 per week per child for a holiday club, is expensive for people who are financially just about managing, especially when they have two £500 per week or three children £750 per week to go to work.

My daughter’s state school offers wrap around care from 7:30 until 18:00 for working parents.
I live in an area that is seen as affluent, but the increase in interest rates on Mortgages after the disastrous but thankfully short lived reign of Liz Truss and inflation of food and increased utility bills are clearly impacting families in my area too!

I think when parents can't provide then the state should provide a week or two somewhere, it doesn't need to be fancy, a youth hostel and some activities.

O.M.G. Is there any limit to what you want the state - ie taxpayers - to pay for?!

Any limit at all to how much time you expect people to work without pay for (which is what tax is) in order to give strangers - for free - absolutely everything they are working to earn for themselves?

When I was a child that was how our holidays worked, I think it is the same as Scottish school holidays.

It actually worked really well because in June everyone in the school was taking an exam of some sort.

I know this would cost but I think children over 10 should be entitled to a holiday each year. I know many many families have holidays but the cost is prohibitive for some parents.

I think when parents can't provide then the state should provide a week or two somewhere, it doesn't need to be fancy, a youth hostel and some activities.

The problem is a lot of parents don't deal with their kids, last Christmas in our area which is a nice area, we had no end of cases of ferals vandalising people's garden decorations, stealing Xmas inflatables altogether or leaving them ripped and broken and little kids in tears! The more holidays there are the more people now have to tolerate crap behaviour from people's kids. Kids creeping around on other people's properties late at night and terrorising pensioners because it's the holidays and too many parents don't care where their 12 year old is at 10.30pm!

But you saying you want the schools closed when it's too hot and that could include June and could include September. If you want the kids off school in high temperatures, you are talking about months and so it doesn't really work to cite that as a reason.

We get about a week more holiday overall in Finland (plus more bank holidays) and shorter school days (some can be only 3 hours long!) as they average the days out over the week for 20 hours in the first years of primary up to 25 in the later years, then 30 hours in upper school (minimum, local curriculums can add more hours for various things, like DS's primary school is adding extra for social/emotional education)

Its the people whose children have already grown up who take the long holidays in my workplace! Which of course they are entirely entitled to (but most of the managers/foremen going on a month's holiday at the same time isn't great)

"Legally prividing a service which people want at a price which leads to a normal level of profit" isn't what profiteering means.

Nothing suits everyone, but longer days are better for full time working parents. It's the lack of availability of wrap-around care at many state schools which is the real killer for working parents.

DH and I both work full time, as do many parents with children at private school.

Parents who work full time wouldn’t be able to cover this?

It would literally be profiteering for holiday clubs

Having red lots of Margaret Atwood books I was under the impression that most kids in Canada went to summer camps n the summer - often by the lakes?

As a student at Uni we were visited by Camp Canada looking for international recruits to staff their summer camps. I thought this was a big part of Canadian culture?

Private schools give an extra week at October half term - which works well and some state schools are following suit on - and also finish a week before Christmas. Of course it's magical! Who wouldn't want their kids off before Christmas?!

I definitely prefer the longer school days and shorter terms of private schol.

That Autumn term is really badly worked out though. 7-8 weeks is a really long slog for the kids, especially as the weather gets darker and colder. Then they all get silly af in December, and the schools don't break up until it's practically Christmas Eve some years. I'd support adding two weeks onto the start of the Christmas holidays and pushing the October half term back a week. Let parents deal with their over-excited, over-stimulated, feral children and see how "magical" they think it is then. 😂

The kids here get loads of holidays, they get about two weeks at Christmas, they get a week in Feb, two weeks at Easter, then a week between Easter and the school summer holidays, they'll get another week off in October or something like and then off for Christmas again.

I’m in Canada. Kids get 8.5-9.5 weeks off for summer depending on how the year falls, plus bank holidays and 2 weeks at Christmas, 2 weeks in March. School is generally 8:20-2:30 but some variations of 8-2 or 8:45-2:45. Always six hours.

Plus as adults we get 10-15 days off for annual leave a year. The vast majority only getting ten.

You are just looking for excuses to get out of teaching! You and everyone else is going to have get used to increased hot weather! We can't all down tools and sit at home through June July and August!

It needs to be realised that in other countries the kids probably get less overall holidays and have longer school days! The kids in my town seem start school and 9 am and be all well on the way home by 3!

There's a very overlooked aspect here! It's ok for teachers who can all go off at the same time as the school shuts but spare a thought for the rest of the working world where it's already 6 weeks of juggling multiple staff absences and people's childcare issues impacting workmates! It can't be all about the parents in the workplace monopolising the summer, child free people should be allowed to have time of as well! I work in a team of 7 where we can't manage the workload if more than one person is off at a time! Very few people would want an extended break because the teachers are the only people that see the benefit!

There are a lot of assumptions in this post:

That children have somewhere to have a water fight… not every child has access to outdoor spaces.

That children have someone to have a water fight with.

That homes are cooler than school buildings, this is often not the case especially homes either retrofitted with insulation or new builds which require a high level of insulation.

Fans don’t cool temperatures in a home, and can be expensive to run.

On a hot day opening a window makes it hotter in a home.

Holiday camps are often I. Schools and include a lot of physical activity. We use a holiday club that offers a full week of football coaching, or one operating from my daughter’s school.

Our independent school used to offer 3 x full Activity weeks FoC for 5-13 Yr olds over summer holidays, unfortunately that's no longer due to impact of VAT. So that's 3 x weeks local parents now have to find alternate (and expensive) childcare. There is no alternate council provision available.

My children might not be doing maths when they are off, but a good chunk of it will be spent at a holiday club...in a school. So not working but not exactly lying around fanning themselves. So more holiday would be more of that.

I've always thought the school summer holiday starts far too late. Invariably it's sweltering for the last few weeks, then they break up late July and the sky turns grey. The nights are drawing in towards the end of the holidays.
I think late June break up, return mid August would be better. With a 2 week Autumn half term break. Most other countries have it earlier.

On the subject of air flow etc - I bet kids can open their windows wide at home. My classroom windows open 15cm at most. There are 32 in the room. It’s awful but thankfully in the British climate it’s only like that for about 10 days at most throughout the year.