Let's slash the school summer holiday

Spectator

3 days ago

There are three little words that strike horror into the heart of every parent of school-age children. They are the words that cause you to break out in a cold sweat or let out a moan in your sleep in the dead of night – even in the middle of winter. They are 'school summer holidays'.
Hear those three words and you may very well envisage jubilant children spewing from the school gates and then remember the dim, distant sun-kissed summers of your own youth. But mention them within earshot of a parent of appropriately aged offspring and you'll see the light go out in their eyes.
Oh yes, the kids are happy – just like the waving teachers who weep with joy to see their charges depart. But now it's time for the parents to weep. Were you fortunate enough to be able to take the whole of the month of August off to 'summer' somewhere – perhaps a holiday home near Padstow in Cornwall or an Italianate villa in some dreamy olive-grove in Tuscany – then it would be a different story. Similarly, if you're one of the privileged few who enjoy a '1950s settlement' – where one spouse does not work (for money) – then I'm sure everything would be rosy or rather, rosé.
But if, like most of us, you are a 'hard-working family' as Gordon Brown liked to put it, then the six-week school summer holidays are a living hell, one which makes August feel like a Godot-esque month without end.
Six weeks. I would rather run the London marathon backwards dressed in a chicken suit in a heatwave than do it all again. And yet here it is.
For working parents this is the ultimate test in work-life-imbalance. It's six weeks of ferrying your children between endless camps, time-absorbing playdates, sailing lessons, swimming lessons and multifarious 'multi-sports' activities – none of which seem to start before nine or ten in the morning and all of which then finish in the middle of the afternoon – all while trying to fit in actual work and things like meetings and conference calls, while also remembering which child has which packed lunch or what snack, and repeatedly re-coating them in sunblock because despite the usually crapness of the British summer, the sun's lethal rays will still zap the little dears' flesh to pieces even when it's overcast.
So as well as doing enough mileage to qualify for a free Yorkie and forking out a fortune on childcare activities – £75 a day for two would seem the going rate – you'll end up working your evenings to catch up, which is incredibly sustainable as anyone knows, particularly resident (or should that be hesitant?) doctors.
Six weeks. I would rather run the London marathon backwards dressed in a chicken suit in a heatwave than do it all again. And yet here it is
Now, this would all be fine if it was just for a few weeks. But it's not, is it? It's for six weeks. It's 40 days and 40 nights of planning, remembering, logistics, lunches, clothing, kit, bags, shoes, trainers, flippers, the wheres, the whens, the with-whoms, all the while maintaining the verisimilitude of professional life. Sooner or later, no matter how good you are at juggling, you end up delivering one 12-year-old dressed in a wetsuit to the toddler's party at a village hall and the toddler who can't swim 15 miles away to a reservoir for capsize training. That's if you can still actually drive at all because your hands are so permanently slimy from all the sun cream.
Unsurprisingly come the first week of September (south of the border, anyway – the Scots go back earlier) you can usually spot the parents of school-age children. They have ghostly, withdrawn faces and move around the around the Lidl car park with a stooped Morlockian gait. Do not cross these men and women. They are teetering on the edge of breaking point.
Is the six-week school summer holiday a species of psychological torture? Quite possibly. What I can say is that once upon a time the smell of sun cream made me think of happy times – now the odour is enough to give me a mild panic attack.
And it shouldn't be this way. Because let's face it, we only have long summer holidays because that's the way it's always been. It's not through design. It emerged this way, it is believed, so that kids could be off school to help with the harvest. Now, if the children were still in the fields helping to gather up wheat and barley, then it wouldn't be such a waste of time. I'd approve of that – better than Fortnite on Nintendo or the brain rot on YouTube – particularly if someone else was watching them so I could get on with some work.
But the fact is they're not – and they haven't been for about a hundred years, not since Laurie Lee had his last sip of cider with Rosie. So, I say, let's move with the times. Let's still have a whopping end of year break, but how about we make it feasible? How about we shave a fortnight off the six weeks and make it a neat month, and distribute that lost time between the holidays at Christmas and Easter or the half terms to spread out the pain?
More than half of parents would support this, according to research by charity Parentkind. I'm not surprised. It would reduce parental breakdowns. It would spread out the exorbitant expense of the summer childcare bill – not unimportant when it can easily run to hundreds of pounds per child. And rather more importantly it would be better for the children because shorter holidays would give their little brains less time to forget absolutely everything that they learned the academic year before. Studies have shown that pupils regress during the long break as they get out of practice with reading and writing.
Shorter holidays would mean a less rude awakening for them when they are required to go back to the daily rigours of school life, with fewer tantrums and tears at drop off. Academic standards would rise accordingly, as each year benefited from the reduced wastage of each summer before.
But we know that the teaching unions would never tolerate it. And can you blame them? If you were in a highly unionised industry and were lucky enough to be in a job where you had six full weeks off in a row each and every summer, would your union agree? Not a chance.
So we're stuck with it. But it would kinder and better all round for the vast majority if it were reformed. Meanwhile, ask yourself this: is it any wonder that Britons are choosing to have smaller families than ever – with about 1.7 kids per family, down from 2.4 40 years ago? No, I thought not.