For anyone who feels that the six week summer holiday is too long…

[Forgottenmyphone]

consider yourself lucky and thank your lucky stars you don’t live in Italy!

My autistic DS (15) finishes next Friday so we have 12 weeks to survive through.

As we live rurally, there are NO summer camps he can attend and we can't afford a family holiday so we'll all be counting down the days until September.

DS hates being outdoors so we'll all be tripping over each other too. I hate Summer!!! 😢

Your last comment negates your penultimate one - and most people can't afford unpaid leave even if it is agreed.

If you can afford long summer holidays in the peak of the summer and expensive holiday camps it is great. If you have to work and cannot afford these it is very hard work and very expensive and stressful.

Exactly this. I don’t understand people banging on saying school is not childcare.

Parents make up a large proportion of the workforce. If there was no school then most of them can’t afford childcare and would stay at home with them. Meaning we need to get more people in overseas to fill the gaps and benefits paid out instead of supporting our own people and kids who are the FUTURE! These same people will be complaining about immigrants.

Imo we should be supporting people to have families. Everyone should be able to afford to have a family not only the rich. Why we have accepted the COL crisis and increasing pressure put on us whilst politicians have made massive profits over this period I don’t know. When we can’t afford to have kids whilst thousands are let in and paid for from abroad every year.

I like the idea of longer holidays, I can see it's beneficial for children to have weeks of freedom, except that "we" wouldn't give them that and they'd be scheduled for the full 12 weeks (or whatever).

From being about 9yo, we'd go out after breakfast and be back for dinner, with no contact in-between. A magical childhood. A week away with parents, a trip to each set of GPs, visits to friends houses, but we mostly entertained ourselves. I never did any holiday clubs.

In countries where it's the norm, what do families do to entertain and mind their DC? It can't be how we do it?

We didn't have any spending money either. We'd be fed at whatever friend's house we happened to be nearest when we were hungry, crisps, penguins and orange squash 😆

If it didn't rain so much I'd happily enjoy 14 weeks of outdoor living in the summer with the children. Sadly our climate makes the majority of the summer miserable and expensive.

Someone’s parent was giving you orange squash and penguins, so presumably it still involved women staying at home.

@Confortableorwhat exactly.
There would usually be one or 2 stay at home mums who would be happy to feed a handful of kids a sandwich and biscuit at lunch time and then let them back out to play - but now no one trusts anyone else and wouldn't want their kids at the house of "someone I don't even know" (which makes the "I hate all the other school mums and want nothing to do with them" threads even more baffling because if people spoke to each other once in a while they wouldn't be strangers).
We need a better sense of community in this country.

I think six weeks holiday is perfect and always goes so quickly. I love all the holidays and half terms, I feel its the only time I get to spend some actual time with my kids as I work weekends and in the week its school/nursery/clubs etc

I grew up on a road exactly like this, in and out of people's houses, and everyone's mums were at home while kids were playing out. Nobody went to work leaving their child doing this all day even if they did stay out all day.

Was just going to ask you to name your source as off the bat scotland data is wrong!

Haven't read the whole thread but I live in Italy! Our holidays this year are 6th June - 16th September- so 14 1/2 weeks?

Italy has awful weather in summer unless you're at the seaside or in the mountains. Too hot to go out in the cities. I'd rather have rain.

Here in Ireland it's one week at Halloween, two at Christmas and Easter. Secondary has a week in February but primaries usually only take two days then but some take a week. Then the rest of the days are up to the school. DD had the first week in May off but DS is in a different school so his school takes extra days after every bank holiday instead. The roads are really quiet now in the morning I reckon a lot of secondary students are already winding down. Also remember we have shorter school days. 11 year old DD in her second last year of primary does 8.30 to 2.10. Her sister starts in September and will do 8.30 to 1.10 for the first two years.

So Irish schooling is basically set up around one parent working. I thought 3:20pm was early.

@LoreleiG yes which is a shame for us single working parents especially when the kids dad only sees them about 10 days a year - never overnight.

@LoreleiG it's more a different attitude to childcare. The assumption once your child starts school is that you still need almost full time childcare so either a crèche that collects or a childminder. My Dcs school doesn't have breakfast club or after school care but some schools do. However they will always be privately operated. I think it's just a different mindset

Individual v society. Your taxes might fund subsidised childcare now but the taxes paid by those children may later fund your pension or care needs. Too many people in the UK think on an overly simplistic individualised level. If people stopped having children because they couldn't afford the childcare there would be an enormous knock-on effect to the whole of society (and the economy).

My mum worked full time, and would be one of those parents for some of the holidays, when she took her leave. We knew which houses had adults at home and where to go if we needed help. I was never aware of it, but I guess they must have organised it between them so there was always cover.

I love living in a country with long summer holidays. Kids get a proper break and wind down

Its interesting that the uk has the shortest holidays yet some of the poorest academic achievements

Somethings terribly wrong ismt it?

How do working parents manage things over the holidays? I agree it's a good thing, but don't know how we'd manage it with our idea of what childcare should look like.

I left high school in 1987, you're probably younger than I and it's changed since my day...

I don’t understand people banging on saying school is not childcare.

Seconded. I would have thought that the chaos caused by lockdown school closures for most of us and the special dispensation that key workers had to send their kids to school so that they could go to work would have taught everyone that schools are de facto childcare.

Yep, it hasn’t been six weeks here for a few years now. This year is five weeks and one day.