Can School Extend Easter?

[EasterEvenLonger]

My kid’s school had published Easter holidays as:
Mon 7 April - Tuesday 22nd April

They have written today to extend it to:
Friday 4 April - Thursday 24 April
An additional 3 working/school days

I can’t list all the reasons this is a fucking nightmare for me. Can they just announce this without any consultation and just 3 weeks notice? They haven’t taken any subsequent days off to compensate. It’s an additional 3 days.

YABU - of course they can
YANBU - no they shouldn’t be able to do this

One year my secondary school went back 2 weeks late after the summer holiday with little notice, the building work they were doing over summer overran. My sister was going into year 8 and had one of her friends over for most of the 2 weeks as her mum couldn't take more time off work
My nieces school moved Christmas by a week with only a few weeks notice and last summer my bosses school shifted the summer holiday back a week and a number of families had already book holidays that the school had to permit

I have said this many times but will try again. The removal company will be moving all the furniture but only the teachers can set up the rooms and put all their stuff where they want. That absolutely takes at least a couple days. They have to decommission the old building and test everything in the new building before the students are there and the teachers need to be around to check everything in their own classrooms.

it’s annoying and frustrating and challenging but this isn’t illegal or surprising or impossible to figure out. Once it’s done, the school will have some brand new space and that will be lovely.

Just a thought, don't know how feasible this would be.

Does the school have a breakfast/afterschool/holiday club provider?
If enough parents would agree to use it they would possibly agree to do the 3 days. Insurance etc would already be in place with dbs checked staff.
Or contact the local authority Education Dept to see if they can help arrange an extension to an existing holiday club that could be used.
Your children are unexpectedly missing out on 3 days of school. Are they not responsible for alternative provision?

There is no need to have a patronising tone.

Teachers do not have to have everything perfectly set up in a classroom in order to teach. If desks, chairs, paper, pens and a whiteboard are there then it is perfectly possible to teach.

All the testing and decommissioning should be done during the Easter holidays.
Tech can be tested easily by any member of staff.

Schools getting removers in?

The school staff had to do all the packing away and putting stuff into containers then taking it out again when the work was finished.

Not much fun lugging desks up and down stairs when you're approaching 60 but we were just told to get on with it.

I'm repeating my post, for those that haven’t read the thread, as it gives a view of the range of considerations needed to manage this move.

@toffeeappleturnip this might help you with your questions and also help posters not having to repeat the same answers.

Schools will endeavour to get any building work done in school holidays (this includes moving buildings) but sometimes it's just not possible to do it in exactly that timescale. This is what's happened and they will have given you as much notice as they can (ie as soon as they realised this would take longer than the published dates). I agree it's not helpful when you are the parent affected but yes they can do this and under these circumstances it's not unusual.

My DDs SEN school had form for this during a building project which went on for 18 months. The last straw was when they added an additional week onto the end of the Christmas break to move classrooms around yet again. I'm afraid I wrote to the Head and the Governors objecting, particularly as I totted up that DD had had an additional 18 days away from school for various reasons - including an extra 2 PD/INSET days (on top of the permitted 5) which the Head had added without any authorisation, as far as I could tell. The excuse was that my DDs class had been the worst affected as their classroom had been moved with every bit of the building work. My complaint was heard, and although they didn't cancel the additional week completely, they did reduce it to 2 days!

If it's a building move I don't see that they have any choice.

Why can't the school be organised enough to move the furniture during the Easter Holidays and actually pay a removal company to do it

Can you imagine how much that would cost? Seriously? And when schools can barely afford pencils and paints?

As for those saying that the teachers should come in on the holidays to do it, if it's anything like my schools move was, they will. Because three days is not enough to move the entire contents of a claim, reorganise and have everything ready for your class. It was a total nightmare.

I get your frustration, @EasterEvenLonger . I see it from both sides. I was a teacher, my DD is the parent of a five year old trying to navigate the whole childcare issue in a job that's not friendly, in that regard. This would be a nightmare for her too.

But the suggestions you've made simply wouldn't work. As others have said, health and safety rules (which are incredibly strict where children are involved) simply wouldn't allow for a phased move. And builders being builders, the school probably didn't know until the last minute, when the move would be.

They can do this as an exception but unless it's an emergency you should have been significant notice and you have every right to complain...and be angry.

It happened with us a couple of years ago with major construction works on site but we had about 6 months notice.

Building work taking place within the school is very different to transferring to a new building that's all ready to go.

Not really, keeping children safe is the priority and needs to meet H&S rules. Staff cannot manage that, whilst sorting appropriate resources to continue teaching and keep large numbers of pupils safe.

Are you thinking that children will be packing boxes? Moving them? Being in the playground when removals wagons are reversing?

We also have no idea of the condition of the school they are leaving…asbestos disturbed ( so doors sealed), plans to pack avoiding fire exits and the need to evacuate a couple of hundred children…

Can you imagine if a child was seriously hurt in the move….

It's honestly not that simple @toffeeappleturnip, at least not in my experience. New buildings are rarely in fact "all ready to go". Even people moving into new build houses find that out.
I've been involved in 2 hospital moves, once as a junior doctor where I basically just showed up and did as I was told which was hard enough, and again as head of department. The latter was one of the most stressful experiences of my life. No matter how well you think you've prepared (and it took over my life completely for months) there are going to be glitches, things you've overlooked, stuff that doesn't work etc.
OK, moving a school isn't going to be as difficult as moving a hospital - you can't empty a hospital of patients whilst you move it for a start - but it is still a big undertaking. Even if a lot of the heavy lifting is done by removers they're not likely to be able to pack and unpack a classroom properly. And there will be staff inductions to do, emergency procedures to test and so on. Yes, you can do walk arounds and familiarisation before a move but that's of limited use in an empty building. Everything looks and feels very different once you've got furniture and equipment in.
There's bound to still be stuff that's not quite right, rooms that need rearranging, things that break or don't work properly in the months after the move until everything is properly bedded in but giving the staff a few days to make the move and be inducted in their new working environment will hopefully make the move as smooth as possible and minimise disruption for the children in the longer term.
I do understand the OP's position. I know as well as anyone how difficult childcare can be to arrange, especially at short notice, but equally I don't think the school are being unreasonable. Physically doing a big move and then getting used to working in your new environment is both physically* *and mentally draining.
The logistics around getting a new public building finished, checked and signed off to move into can be anything but predictable. I doubt very much that the school have known for ages and have only just decided to tell the parents. It could well have been only just agreed.

Ex teacher here. State schools teach for 190 days per year and work 5 inset training days per year. Management do have the right to close on additional days where it's not safe for the children to be on the premises, like snow days. Moving equipment from one building to another would be another. Staff would still be expected to work on these days so the days can't be made up.

The extra days will be down to the move to new building. Buildings rarely completed on schedule. There would not have been any way to know when the building would be ready

Because the staff would need to know where everything is and be organised ready to teach the children.

https://www.lancashire.gov.uk/media/929001/unavoidable-school-closures-guidance.pdf#page5

End of page 6 - it doesn’t sit very well with me as it’s not an emergency. Though this is a regional guide it cites national guidance which to be honest I couldn't actually find.

I’d be interested to know if the LA know about this spurious school closure!?!

Yeah I heard.

Takes 3 days apparently.

At least.

Would just like to point out that’s schools are not childcare…

I have to military manage my own children’s childcare and pay more than a mortgage for it. It’s wild how everyone see’s it as childcare

Offer to pay friends parents to watch them for the day, you'd likely find someone who would be glad to for free but if not a bit of extra cash would almost definitely make someone willing to.

I don’t understand this argument. Literally nobody thinks it’s childcare. The obvious point is that parents only organise their actual childcare for the published days that school is not scheduled. You’ve just said yourself you have to manage your own childcare carefully?

Also, you’re literally about the 20th person to parrot it on this thread. I’m not sure if people say it because they think it makes them sound clever? Like the same people who like to say if it’s not an accident or emergency, don’t go to A&E to someone who clearly needs urgent medical assistance and doesn’t have any options.

Eh? Who sees school as childcare? Some feckless parents maybe but surely the overwhelming majority of parents plan for the published holidays and are rightly pissed off with short notice changes however unavoidable they might be

If you take your child out for a holiday, the rest of the class has learned things that your child has missed so your child is now behind the rest of the class. If the school is closed, all the children are at the same stage. In November/December 2010 our schools were closed for the best part of 2 weeks because of snow. All the children missed the same days and they were all at the same stage so no one needed caught up for having been the only one to have missed days.

The council area where my DDs went to school rebuilt or refurbished every one of its primary schools over a period of 15 years and this involved the existing schools being emptied to move either to a new build or to temporary premises. In every instance, the pupils had additional days added to holidays to allow the teachers to set up their classrooms in the newbuild/refurb and familiarise themselves with the building (packing up was generally done while the pupils watched DVDs). Again, every pupil in a class had missed the same number of days.