To think the long school holidays are not for the teachers' benefit?

[NotInMyDay]

Discussion on BBC Breakfast this morning re long school holidays. A rep from teachers' union was saying the long school holidays were vital for teachers to rest and recuperate so that they could do the best for our children at the start of the next school year.

AIBU to think that it's the children who need this break and therefore the teachers have it too? Rather than NEEDED by the teachers.

I think that most teachers do a fantastic and unenviable job but they don't need to recuperate any more than GPs, surgeons, nurses, bus drivers etc.

"Mine get out of the routine on a Saturday & Sunday, when they wake up, potter about, watch a bit of TV or play a game & are not at school!!!!!"

That's just a weekend routine.

I'd like my children to have space in their year for things a little more exciting and challenging than pottering about and watching television.

"Being a child is all about learning how to be a grown up."

:(

That might be the most depressing thing I've read on MN.

"I'm not sure there is alot more to being a child than learning as much as you possibly can..."

I agree with that part.

But that does not imply a life based entirely around formal learning and school.

There are other things to learn.

Things that can't be achieved in a weekend.

It is not depressing at all - it is life!!!!!! I'd much rather mine were in school than working.
I don't want to make this personal - but we do stacks of stuff at the weekend and my DCs do lots during all the holidays too. They have to, because I work full-time. There is only me, their father upped & left 9 years ago. I get 5 weeks a year & they get 18 or whatever it is, so they attend sailing camps, ski-ing camps, multi-activity camps etc etc. They have a great time, I pay through the nose & then we fill the 5 weeks that I have off too.
I am not suggesting, and have never suggested through out this thread that children should be at school 52 weeks of the year. I just think the structure that we currently have was designed for a society that does not exist any more. I'm trying to get some thoughts on what others on here, particularly teachers think might be alternative solutions.

Perhaps there is an argument for reorganizing the holidays, as long as all authorities do so at the same time. My children's school has 2 weeks June half term and 5 weeks summer, which is fine. Children do need the holidays though. Since I was at school, education has become much more of a relentless slog through the exam machine than it ever used to be;the children do get tired.

IME, teachers need the holidays to get much of their work done in - things like large amounts of coursework marking, or preparation ( I always had to spend several days of the Easter holidays making up the apparatus for the A Level practical exams).

Teachers don't claim to have the monopoly on tiring jobs and long hours. However, there are not many jobs where one person is solely responsible for the health and safety of 35 people who are not only not adult enough to take full charge of their own safety, they often actively attempt to create dangerous situations. And that's what I found most draining.

PostBellum - not directed at you personally, but I think we need to move away from the idea that school is just there to provide child care. Most working parents don't have holidays which match their children's - the answer is better holiday care provision, not more hours in school.

PostBellum, do you find the holidays so difficult because you think they need filling with activities? Yours must be near to an age where they can be left to entertain themselves without the need for childcare? Wouldn't it be easier if you just let them be occasionally?

Hi Noble, mine are 10 & 12 so sadly not of an age where I can leave them on their own from 8am until 6pm - I'm not 100% sure - but I think it is illegal still. I can't wait to let them be for a bit & I'm sure they'd relish being let be too!

PostBellum - not directed at you personally, but I think we need to move away from the idea that school is just there to provide child care. Most working parents don't have holidays which match their children's - the answer is better holiday care provision, not more hours in school.

I agree with you completely. I'm sure many working parents come unstuck with the long school hours, but that shouldn't mean that all children should be in a classroom every week throughout the year. There must be an alternative but then, I suppose, that would cost money to pay childcare providers.

There will always be someone who thinks that teachers should be happy to cut their holidays in half for no extra out of the goodness of their hearts to solve the problem!

Feenie, should explain the tiredness.

All exam classes (Years 11 and 12) are at 22-25. We do the equivalent of the classroom tasks of GCSE but they are very strictly run, we have to have them marked, moderated and back to the students within fortnight, so it means keeping very strict deadlines as we work in teams of 6-8. For English it's a colossal load, 6 times in 7 months.

Some good things:we don't do revision classes as all texts for the exam are assessed in the same academic year. There are no "catch-up" sessions, the students does it when everyone else does, or does it after school. This also means the student can't be "helped" by the teacher.

The kids leave in late October, and the whole thing starts again on December 1st as that's when the new academic year starts. This v. knackering as you have to be all up for it and impressing the newbies when you'd like to curl up in a corner and sleep.

The good thing is I no longer spend summer holiday time thinking about next year's work because I began it the year before. Oh, and the students are basically co-operative, so no day-to-day grind in the classroom.

So, on balance, happier.:)

DH and I are both teachers. We have two DC and look forward to the holidays enormously. Do we go on and on to our families about how much work we do outside of school/in the holiday? No! Our siblings earn a lot more than us, have bigger houses than us and go on more exotic holidays than we do. They also complain about their jobs, salaries etc. a whole lot more than we do. We both love our jobs and accept that the increased termtime workload is a part of the choice we made when we went into teaching. However, this choice was made with the knowledge that the time off school, although defined for us and not open to any flexibility at all, ever, was more generous than in other sectors.

For us, the long holidays are the pay-off for having no control over our time off school. Since our eldest was born 7 years ago, the holidays have been even more important; they are the 13 weeks in the year when our children don't have to compete with the demands of planning, marking, assessments, parents' evenings, school shows etc. etc. for our attention.

If school terms were to be extended but we were to be paid for the extra weeks worked and, crucially, we could actually and actively choose when to have time off school (DH and I work in different LAs and, from September, the DCs will represent a third) then we wouldn't 'need' to recuperate!

Obviously there would be some disruption to the learning of the 30 children in my class and the 200 or so that DH teaches but I'm sure parents across the country would be happy to sacrifice a fortnight or so of their child's learning every year so that my family and I can go on cheaper holidays . I'm sure too that they will be completely understanding if my cheap holiday coincides with preparation time for NC tests, GCSEs, A-levels etc. or if their children find it hard to settle with a cover teacher who doesn't know them/their needs/the schemes of work or, if on our return, our various classes are 'behind' where they should be as the result of the disruption.

Other jobs are just as demanding too, but perhaps the difference (and my brother is a dr and sister a nurse, so I can compare a little) is that you go home and that's it, your home-time is your own. Teachers don't have that.

You know, I have every respect for the work that teachers do, I know it's hard and I don't begrudge them even the teeniest bit of their holidays - they absolutely deserve them. But comments like this make me want to weep.

So few professional people can leave their work at the office these days, and comments like this just make teachers seem so out of touch. I'm sure it's only a minority, but it really does seem like moaning to the rest of us, and it does the teaching profession such a disservice.

I'm a fan, I really am - I'm usually the first to leap to the defence of teachers when this sort of thing is discussed. But comments like this do make me begin to lose sympathy...

Jinsel, hard to see why you should object that poster's opinion, it was based on her observation of the work/life patterns of real people she knows, in specific jobs. How is that out of touch? She didn't generalise, which makes a change on these threads.

I would say that the difference is that when a teacher is doing the job i.e. in the classroom with the DCs they are giving 100% -it is a bit like being on stage. There is no time to do any of the other parts of the job until the DCs have gone home or are out to play.
If I see my doctor she is looking at my notes as we speak, she is updating at the same time, or before she calls the next patient in.
I saw my solicitor and she was making notes.She can then pass a lot of it onto someone else to type letters etc. The teacher can't write any notes at the time and hasn't got anyone to write things up for them.
You can use a TA for mundane tasks but I prefer to have them working with the DCs and they can't do both at the same time.
Primary is especially hard in that lessons go much smoother if you have all the equipment ready,in the right place. The younger the DCs the more important this is-there are no technicians to instruct. It takes time. It gets easier as they get older and they can mix paints, put them on the tables, find a brush for everyone etc.

Maybe, echt. To me, it read like a generalisation based on her knowledge of two people's working patterns. It strikes me as being very out of touch to assume that the difference between teaching and "other jobs" is that teachers are the only ones who take work home with them.

I have never had a job in which I could leave the office at the end of the day and just switch off, and I know very few other professional working people who can do that. Most people I know do a fair amount of unpaid overtime and consider it to be the norm - my organisation only pays overtime for staff on the lowest grades for example, as it is simply expected that those in graduate level jobs will do as many hours as it takes to get the job done. Many people - including me - are supplied with smartphones and/or laptops so that they can take calls & respond to emails out of hours, or when on leave etc. In my last two roles, there has been an expectation that I would be on call one week in four, including weekends - in my current role, this is less restrictive, but in my last job, I had to remain within a 30-minute radius of my workplace all week and couldn't drink while on call etc.

I think that the long school holidays are important for both pupils and teachers. There is life outside the classroom and beyond school that pupils need to learn about, and, crucially, teachers need to keep up with. I'll be very honest and say that, IME, some teachers live in a little cocoon of school and have very little clue of what they ought to be preparing children for beyond the classroom. I think it would be catastrophic to deprive teachers of the opportunity to breathe and take in the adult world during the holidays.

Sorry - posted too soon. I just wanted to say that, because such practices are so widespread, it seems very odd to me that teachers would claim to be unique in any way because their time is not their own, and that this should somehow entitle them to longer holidays.

Don't get me wrong, I am most definitely not in the "teachers have it easy" camp. I know it's a really tough and demanding role, I don't think we pay them enough and if the longer holidays go some way towards compensating them for that, I am pleased for them. I think it's absolutely right that the teaching unions should stand up for the rights of their members, and that they should make the case to counteract the common view that teaching is easy because teachers work short days and have long holidays blah blah blah. Clearly that is bollocks, but in trying to make their case that teaching is stressful and demanding, there appears to be a tendency to want to argue that it is more stressful and more demanding than any other role. Sadly, this does make them seem out of touch, and in my view, loses them a lot of sympathy and support as it is patently untrue.

Interestingly, bonsoir, I worked in an overseas education system several years ago in which many teachers were seconded at some point during their careers to posts outside of the education sector. Those who had undertaken these secondments certainly gained insights that they had not been able to gain while in the school environment.

Some of the best teachers I ever had as a teenager were those who had switched into the role from other careers.

Where, anywhere on these threads have teachers claimed to be unique?

Also, can we have a thread where posters think it's a good idea for doctors/ nurses/ lawyers/surgeons/social workers/ binmen, etc. etc. et fricking c. get a job outside their field in order to be BETTER at what they do?

No, not going to happen; never has, never will, but teachers are so fucking limited, in a way no other worker is, that others, looking at you jinsel and bonsoir, suggest otherwise.

I have 3 very different children and by the Easter and summer holidays they are desperate for a break.I actually don't think kids get enough of a summer break,in other countries they get more.

School holidays should have no baring on the needs of parents but on the needs of children and yes the needs of children too.I have no wish for my dc to be taught by burnt out frazzled staff.When I was a teacher I spent the best part of 2 or 3 weeks of the summer working. You need the other 3 weeks to totally switch off.

It annoys me when I hear people complaining about how difficult it is to find childcare during the hols. Whilst I sympathise(and think more needs to be done)I don't think the needs of children should be put second to the needs of some parents.

Tbh many of the worst teachers I have known have come to it as a second career. Many of them seem less passionate about it and want it to fit in with their life easily. I have known have come to it as a second careeer

echt, I don't know why you need to be so aggressive, it doesn't really help your case.

I am not suggesting that teachers should be sent to work in other fields in which they have no experience or qualifications. Personally, I find it a rather odd idea, but it is interesting nonetheless, and I was merely commenting that this is what was done in another system.

As for teachers claiming to be unique, that is certainly how I read the post which I quoted above: Other jobs are just as demanding too, but perhaps the difference... is that you go home and that's it, your home-time is your own. Teachers don't have that." If I have misinterpreted, I apologise, but that's how I read it.

echt- I'm with you there. How fucking patronising. The "some of the best teachers I had were those who had done something else" is massively insulting. I've been a teacher since 1997. I did my PGCE straight after my degree because I REALLY wanted to teach. And I'm pretty bloody good at it thank you. The fact that it's the only job I've done does not mean I'm out of touch. I've taught in three very different schools and, like every single one of my colleagues, am learning all the time. The fact that I wasn't anything else first is irrelevant.

Jinsei- "doesn't help your case" ???

Perhaps that's the issue here- apparently teachers have to "make a case". Any other professions constantly asked to justify pay or holidays? Um... Thought not.

I get 7 weeks holiday so am very lucky. The rest of the time I work about 45 hours pw, 40 at work and 5 at home. DH nowadays takes about 3-4 weeks holiday and works about 60 hours per week - about 45 - 50 at work and 10 at home.

The difference, I think, is that neither DH nor I would dream of complaining about our workload and how tired we were to our clients or other colleagues. That's the difference and many a time at a concert or a school meeting I inwardly groaned when the HT got up and started telling 00's of parents about how tired all her staff were at the end of term. Especially when about half those parents were using a 1/2 day of annual leave to get to the school event to support their children.

That is the marked difference in my opinion between the independent and state sectors (and have had dc in both). The independent schools do not complain about their working conditions to the parents. It is also a huge difference between primary and secondary. At the secondary our dd attended the staff did not complain to the same extent as at the primary although I suspect they had the harder job and the more challenging students. Well they did have the more challenging students - that's why we moved her because there was no will to deal with them and ensure every child fulfilled their learning potential.

evil, I'm sorry if you felt patronised, that wasn't my intention. I was relaying my own particular experience, and yes, a couple of teachers who had career changed into teaching did stand out for me. That's not to say that some of the other teachers were not great teachers too - some of them were, and I am deeply grateful to all of them.

FWIW, I think career changing is generally quite a positive move, and temporary secondments to very different roles are common in my field, as it's considered beneficial to gain a broader range of experience. So please, don't feel patronised, as that wasn't how it was meant.

FFS, evil, where have I said that teachers should have to make a case for their paid holidays? I haven't, and as I have already clearly stated, I don't think they should.

But I have made reference to the fact that the teaching unions need to make the case that teaching is not an easy option, simply because that is how it is (wrongly) perceived by many people. It isn't right, but sadly I think teachers do have to make that case in order to be taken seriously. Not to me, I hasten to add - I have close friends and family who are teachers, and I know damn well how hard they work. I see it in my daughter's teachers too. But the perception of short days, long holidays and an easy life is still quite widespread.

I think teachers are right to challenge such stereotypes if they can be arsed to do so (and fair enough if they can't), but I can't see he having a massive chip on the shoulder is going to help.