Are schools legally obliged to provide a certain number of days of education per year?

[tricot39]

that is it really - and where can I find out more about what should be legally provided? Thanks

Try the 1988(?) Education Act. It was about then that the no. of teaching hours and days were set out and also the 5 inset days were introduced.

It has happened in DCs' school, where essential - but non-emergency - maintenance was carried out in term-time. The whole heating and hot water system was replaced and the LA scheduled the work to begin 4 days before the end of the autumn term. As such, the children had a maximum of 186 days' education and a stonkingly large Xmas holiday, which they loved!

Last year the school had to close for one snow day and also a scheduled power outage by ENWL which meant the school had no electricity for the day.

These things happen, but to compare them to parents taking term-time holidays, where every other child in the school is still receiving an education, is a little bit disingenuous.

Sorry for drip feeding but it was when the school (in addition to the planned building works) recently added a 6th inset day for surprising reasons (which I don't want to reveal in case I somehow land the school in hot water) that I got interested in the basis of the whole thing.

I'm sorry that I keep confusing things by referring to attendance policy - but it is the only thing that I have to indicate the "value" of a missed day. To be clear - I am not trying to defend term time holidays!

Googling has finally found me this: The Education (School Day and School Year) (England) Regulations 1999.

It says "Where at any time a school is prevented from meeting for one or more sessions for which it was intended that it should meet, and it is not reasonably practicable for arrangements to be made for it to meet at an alternative time for those sessions, the school shall be treated for the purposes of paragraph (2) as if it had met as intended."

For planned works this does seem to suggest that alternatives should be considered.

I think this answers my question - it seems to me as though some (optional?) homework should be provided for those concerned about planned closure.

Private schools don't do the same actually. We share contract buses with two local private schools. They finish the same time as us every day, but have shorter terms. Not all private schools do longer days and Saturday school.

The timing was such that this could have been done in the holidays either by paying teachers overtime or by employing professional movers to avoid disadvantaging the children.

Completely unworkable, you cannot enforce specific extra days in for staff, and there is no way professional movers could possibly have any idea what so ever what to do with teaching resources or class room arrangements.

The building works may have been planned, but still necessary and unavoidable.

I'm sure any that could have been done in the holidays was anyway,

I have known schools closed for other reasons, funerals, health and safety failures, water contamination, flooding, fire, heating break down, once because the fire alarm could not be set up properly.

They all seem to be reasonable reasons for emergency closure charis.

The thing with sending work home is that lessons are not like that. Teachers teach. That means that they introduce, explain and demonstrate new topics or new ways of finding out how to solve problems, investigate and enquire, etc.

It's not like filling in a worksheet or reading pages 10-15 of a science book and answering questions. It's completely different and not something that can be packaged up and sent home.

This is why it's so difficult when a pupil misses this input because they are away but the rest of the class get it and move on. When the school is closed, no-one is missing anything.

Clearly if the whole school is shut then all the pupils miss a day's education so they are all equal. However they have all lost out on teaching time compared to other schools who will mostly have had 190 days of teaching.....

it does apply to private schools because its in fact the number of teaching hours : longer days = shorter terms

I disagree. Like an earlier poster added-the private school nearby share a contract bus with a nearby state school. Their school days are identical but the private school term times are considerably shorter.

What are your concerns, OP?

Yes, you say the children have missed out on teaching time, but are they falling behind? Not meeting their targets?

I'm just not sure from your OP what you're worried about.

When DDs school moved into a new building they had 2 exceptional closure days and all the children had to be given work to complete in them to make up for missing two days of school.

15 extra days off in two years is a lot! Which school is it? Has it been rebuilt or something?

When our school was closed for a long time following a fire they prioritized getting the older children who were taking their GCSEs back into the classroom and the rest of us were on "study leave" - ie we had longer assignments than the usual homework, set on the day that we went into school and due back in the following week.