Gove says lengthen school days and shorten long summer holiday

[juneau]

Here: www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-22202694

I think it's a great idea and I'm sure working parents will welcome it. I also think it's bollocks that teachers need the six week summer break to recharge their batteries. Do they work harder or longer hours than other workers who only get four or five weeks a year then?

Having just endured a bored DS1 over the Easter holidays I think any break of more than two weeks is actually pretty dull for kids and I'm sure poorer kids really suffer from lack of stimulation and/or money to do stuff.

I am a working parent, and I think the idea sucks. Do not support it at all. Apart from anyhting else, if you look at it from the pov of a working parent (which you shouldn't, really, because school is education not childcare) it will be CRAP if every family in the land has to manage to get two parents off work for the exact same period that every ofher family in the land is trying to get off for work. Employers will be saying 'no', or closing down. Or else parents will have to bear the brunt of accepting that they cannot get time off for a holiday during the school hols, and we all end up in Gradgrind's joyless Britain.

Other things contribute to a child's development other than time on school. Self-directed time and activities, time spent with other children not under the supervison of an adult, all the Yr 7s I know now spend time in the park or going off on the bus to events on town or whatever. Untimetabled time is crucial.

I know untimetabled time is often a bad time for anti-social behaviour, but rather than tackle that by keeping everyone in school why not re-instate the Youth Service? School shouldn't be used to Keep The Off The Streets any more than as free childcare.

DS works really hard at school and at his homework. I will resist very strongly attempts to corral him in school for any more weeks of the year or hours of the day.

I work really hard, have 4 weeks holidays and often work at weekends. I get paid well over the average. Its MY choice. I dont have to do this role. Its the same with teachers. There are huge advantages to being a teacher, job for life, final salary pension, able to move throughout the UK, no real fear of being sacked if you arent any good, lots of holidays etc.

I am really not knocking teachers (although it might sound it!) but there are advantages and disadvantges in all roles.

I'll list mine:

Pros

Able to work at home on occasions
Big blue chip company
Good salary

Cons

Long hours
Interruptions at weekends
Very low pay rises (0-1% per year)
Endless appraisals with a pressure on line management to mark you down or manage you out of the business due to headcount challenges

"Larry, the average salary is £26k which includes everyone from low paid workers to the very highly qualified. Are you really saying that teachers should be earning £80k everywhere in the UK. "

Handcream, are you seriously going to compare teachers with the national average salary? You need to compare like with like. Teaching is trying to attract good graduates from good universities. These are the cream of the country. If you want these people to go into teaching, you either have to offer them money comparable to what they would earn elsewhere, or a different kind of profession altogether, which is what is in place now.

If you were a graduate with a 2(I) in a tough subject from Imperial College (say), why would you be enticed into teaching?

Handcream,

They are trying to make teachers far more sackable and to upskill the workforce, which I am totally in favour of. However, if they are clever people doing a good job, they should be commensurately rewarded for it.

If you assume the above, what comparator would you like to use for them? Finance professional, management consultant, doctor? Hmmmm, gets hard to argue that they are overpaid and underworked if you choose any of those, doesn't it. And if you choose your average middle management office worker, is that the calibre of person that you want teaching your children?

Number of teachers quitting the profession up by a fifth in 2010/11

www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-20585457

Can't imagine Gove will have improved the situation.

I noticed over Easter how my dd taught herself so many things just because she had free time to follow up her interests - with no input from me. I feel too that when you are learning soemthing, it is good to occasionally take a short break. It seems to me that in that time, your brain has gone a step further and processed what was learnt. I have no neurological evidence for this but this is what I have noticed with my dd. Things learnt and revised daily in short periods are acquired best but sometimes a short break helps. Longer breaks perhaps not.

However, I can imagine a dc growing up in a family where books are not generally read, no holidays are possible, there is little parental care or interaction with the dc, little emphasis on education or acquiring life skills is not going to benefit from shorter school days or longer holidays. It isn't true of MNer dc in general I don't think, whether or not there is a SAHP, we seem to all spend a lot of time thinking about and discussing education, however it must be the case for some schoolchildren and they will fall by the wayside.

I just want to give you a small example of my work load. We will take a Wednesday as example.

Get up early,
Feed kids
Take to child minders for 8, the earliest she starts
Get to school for 8.10
Prepare tutor group activity, check email, check bulletin and rota
Staff briefing
Tutor group time - I need to provide interesting and educational activities for the children to do in the 25 minute time, I also take the register, give out notices, record any correspondence from home, check planners and record in computer any concerns from teachers, record in computer any conversations I have with children about learning or anything personal. I am also expected to hold 1:1 tutorials with all pupils whilst assemblies are going on, all of which is recorded on computer.
Lesson 1 -5 an hour each of teaching lessons showing that ALL pupils are making rapid and sustained progress, proving that I am using baseline data to differentiate for all pupils, complete assessment for learning in class and record it against each pupil, if course I may actually spend tme helping a student if stuck! Giving out and collecting home work,

I now have 5 classes of 30 students work and home work that needs marking and has to have clear written feedback on how they can improve. I have to record it on the computer and plan for my next lesson, taking into account ech individuals progress.

Lunchtimes - computing for girls or raspberry pi or GCSE CLUB or duty outside.
.
Break times - detentions for three days, duty for one.

get the kids
Go home
Have some resemblance of family life
Kids to bed
Now mark and plan for the 5 lessons I have just had.

It's doesn't take into account 6th form lessons where the marking is much more detailed, any problems that may have to be recorded, phone c alls home, emails to performance leaders, parents evening, options evening, after school clubs, the 6 reports for every student I teach each year, curriculum meetings, performance management.

It also does not take not account the horrific trauma some of these kids go through and fallout from bullying, social media and then also intervention for the pupils who are failing. Or how utterly exhausting teaching a class full of students actually is. I don't stop having interactions of some sort all day.

If they fucked me over on holidays like they did with my pension, then I couldn't cope. Added to the fact that everyone has an opinion and could do better than you and I'm just lazy then I wonder why I do it at all.

Plus! I want to see my own children!

What about the existing teachers? Are you saying by default they will get these sorts of salaries as well..... Teachers get three times the holidays than most other professions. If required they can be home by 1600. So, its not like with like.

Handcream,

I am not arguing against the current salary structure. I am arguing against increasing the time commitment with no increase in salary, which is what Gove is suggesting.

If these proposals come hand in hand with powers (I'm talking secondary level here) to permanently remove badly behaved children at the third strike, make parents more responsible for their children's poor behaviour, the ability to actually enforce discipline measures such as detention for incomplete work and homework, etc etc, all things which would improve teachers' conditions immeasurably in this country, then maybe it will work. As others have said, I would rather teach 60 well-behaved children at once than 20 little toerags, or even classes of 25-29 with 4-5 toerags in each (which when the norm where and when I was still teaching).

As far as leave in my new job is concerned- I work for myself, so decide my own hours and when I take holidays. It's brilliant. I'm answerable to no-one especially not 5 different sets of paymasters.

due to the conditions under which teachers are currently having to work (pupil behaviour, administrative demands, constant changes to the curriculum, etc.), it is a very stressful job. If some of these factors were to change, a longer day might be more amenable. As it is, I think we would have burn-out problems.

handcream, you keep saying that. When I worked I could leave at 4 to collect my children from school only one day a week- on that day I finished teaching at 2:30. The rest of the time I was in 7:45 to 5:30, plus another 3-4 hours at home in the early morning and early evening. I went to went at 10-11 and got up at 5 every day for 4 years before developing quite serious health problems. This is in no way an unusual work pattern.

I heard a good discussion about this on Radio 4 earlier, to the effect that quantity is nothing to do with quality, and that Finland has very low amounts of school hours in a year (800 compared to just over 900 in Britain) and regularly tops all academic performance tables. Private schools have longer school days but these are not all timetabled hours in many cases (i.e. a lot more time is spent on extracurricular, enrichment-style activities) and many of them have much longer holidays. Apparently a lot of studies almost unanimously suggest that longer school hours by themselves have no effect on performance.

OP has misunderstood the reason for school holidays, I think, which is not for the teachers but for the children.

There is an argument, however, that the six-week school holiday is not good for those children from poorer backgrounds who don't get to spend their holidays travelling/doing activities which are either economically expensive or have high levels of cultural capital associated with them (museums, galleries, libraries, etc etc.). Statistically speaking, several studies have apparently shown that poorer children tend to regress/stagnate over the holidays while those from more affluent backgrounds tend to improve.

I think there is room for reasoned debate on this. I think Michael 'yada yada yada' Gove doesn't do reasoned debate and is just seeking another way to encourage people to view teachers as lazy burdens on taxation. I'm not going to bother commenting on how hard teachers do or don't work compared to other professions - it's what Michael Gove wants us to do and it's pointless. Good teachers who work hard exist and are valued by children and parents; bad teachers who don't work hard also exist - same for every profession and nothing to do with the hours we expect our children to attend education.

Leave the holidays alone and concentrate on making sure state schools have the teachers and equipment/tools they need to reach a high standard. I only have one DC of school age at the moment and he is exhausted by the hols.

I agree with littleducks comment though.

Duchesse - how I agree with you re badly behaved children. They spoil it for the rest. They take up huge amounts of time to resolve. Its one of the reasons we went privately. Whilst there is of course a few (and I really mean a very few) who do behave badly they are very quickly removed and asked to leave.

I couldn't be a teacher. Or a nurse. Or a carer. Or any of those roles which are a vocation to some who have a natural capacity for putting themselves out there to care and help but are generally poorly paid, under-respected jobs. So let's heap even more pressure on them and really put people off entering those careers. Because you can guarantee that Gove won't be putting his money where his mouth is.

In primary schools the majority of teachers and TAs are female, women are largely the chief child-carers in the family. Stating the obvious I know - but this proposal won't be helping those WOHMs will it?

we are a low income family and find the summer hoilday

PS - what would really improve standards and enrich children's experiences at school would be class sizes of no more than 20. 15 even. That would have a dramatic effect.

But it would cost a lot of money.

Far easier to hint that teachers aren't working hard enough, which, as I said, has nothing to do with how hard we want our children to work.

Erebus - I too have experience of the German education system, and agree with some of what you say about apprenticeships etc. But we would need to overhaul the entire system in order to achieve the outcomes you mention - including introducing a three-tier education system that for many would have uncomfortable echoes of the 11+.

I just hate this insidious 'race to the bottom' argument - "My job's crap, so yours should be too". This is exacerbated by many people's lack of understanding about what actually goes on in schools. As larrygrylls and others have already stated, it is the most capable, qualified teachers - precisely those that Gove wants to attract - who are most likely to seek alternative careers. I'm one of them. I had no trouble finding better-paid, lower-stress employment elsewhere, and I am vastly happier and healthier since I gave up teaching. Perhaps the teaching profession wouldn't 'haemorrhage' teachers were these proposals to be implemented, but the ones who remained stuck in the job would be those who are probably least equipped to cope with its increasing demands.

I've no idea whether Gove is proposing 9-5 for all children, or only the older ones. That's precisely the problem; no one seems to know exactly what he intends. These vague proposals have been mooted in a confrontational way that seems designed to further goad the unions, who are on the brink of strike action as it is. If they do call a strike, Gove can divide and rule to his heart's content, painting the education profession as militant and intransigent and attempting to mop up support from working parents.

I'm by no means claiming that working parents would only support longer hours because they want free wraparound childcare. Many parents on this thread are wholly against the proposals My argument is that this seems to be what the government wants to achieve, and yet this is not what our schools were ever intended for. It's unfortunate that the argument (not just here; in other media as well) is already turning into a bunfight between working parents and the education profession, with many forgetting that teachers are also parents. Very few people are considering the children who are at the heart of all this. Yes, we live in a changing world, but I find it incredibly sad that a person's worth is increasingly judged by their economic output. My best friend spent a year teaching in Japan on the JET programme. She was horrified at the long hours and amount of stress her students were under, and how depressed and dysfunctional many of the teenagers were as a result. I wouldn't want that for children here.

I think it is a good idea. Never understood why summer holidays are so long.

Isn't it the parents' job in the main to stimulate their own kids?
I get really fed up of those parents who seem to think that it is our job to bring up/ stimulate/ discipline their kids. We do our best, but it is not our job to do your job for you.

I am/ was a teacher.....you do need the breaks, but I agree that 6 weeks is too long. I would prefer to see shorter terms with more regular, but shorter holidays. I get bored too during the summer! And the kids forget loads that they have learnt. Also, before the end of say a 12 week term you can tell that the kids need a break, as we do....they completely lose it!

Teaching
Pros: holidays
Reasonable salary
Never boring

Cons:
Massive term time workload and being knackered from constantly performing
Unable to take time off in term time, and not just for holidays
Exam result pressure, having to get good results from kids who don't care
Fear of parental complaint, false accusation, somehow messing up
Dealing with poor behaviour (v stressful)
School unable to deal with poor behaviour (not allowed to get rid of bad kids, lack of effective sanctions, blaming teachers for poor behaviour)
Being blamed for society's ills while being told you have it easy
Training kids to jump through hoops for league tables (unethical)
Dealing with awful situations with children (student death, teacher death, sexual assault disclosures, shitty parents)
Crappy work facilities, leaking classrooms, overcrowded classrooms, no air con, rubbish ICT facilities, lack of textbooks
Ofsted
Having to listen to Michael Gove
Marking.

I still don't understand this idea teachers don't get paid holidays

Yeah, I know I shouldn't engage, but the way I understand it... teachers' contracts call for a defined amount of contact time. The way the T&C are written it's assumed within those terms at that pay rate that they get the equivalent of 4 weeks paid holiday like rest of us. Which is then paid out (averaged) over the 12 months. What teacher's don't get is 13 weeks of stated explicit holiday pay; but they do still get holiday pay like any other employee.

I am going to try to find some T&C for Japanese teachers.

we are a low income family and find the summer holiday too long. We can't afford to go on big days out (ie theme parks) or on holiday. Even a trip to the beach can be expensive by the time you have made the picnic and brought a few treats. Any kind of activity that is free is usually booked up or really crowded. I think shorter summer holidays would be a good thing for my family as my children get bored and my DH and I would not be worrying that they had a crap holiday because they didn't get many as they didn't get to do much during the holiday. Although my kids understand why we don't do much during holidays I still feel guilty.

I don't like the idea of a longer school day I think for primary school children the day is long enough. But maybe when they start secondary school they would benefit from a longer day where things like PE and the arts could be fitted into the curriculum more often or even homework groups.