Teachers deserve their long summer holidays

Spectator

3 days ago

What's the best thing about teaching? July and August! Or so the old joke goes. The long school holidays are an easy riposte to teachers' complaints about the profession. Below inflation pay rises? At least you get the school holidays. Lack of flexible working opportunities? Six weeks off over summer. Disruptive behaviour? At least you don't have to see the rugrats over Christmas and Easter.
No-one really wants to hear it, but most teachers still feel a knee-jerk need to justify their summer holidays: to explain how hard they work; the hidden hours of marking, planning, report-writing; the free time lost to parents' evenings and away sports fixtures.
The sheer exhaustion of performing day-in, day-out is difficult to convey to people outside of the profession; I have friends who fret for days over a one-hour work presentation, and yet teachers present around five times a day 180 days a year.
There are many metaphors I could use to try to impart how demanding teaching is. A never-ending hamster wheel. A seven-hour-long improv performance where you are not allowed to drop character. A stand-up comedy show with lots of drunk hecklers, but you aren't allowed to heckle back.
The best analogy I can think of is this: imagine you are hosting a party for 30 people, all with very different interests, needs and dietary requirements. You have to do all the usual work of party-planning – who sits where, what you are going to do, how everyone will get on, what speech you will give – but you know that many people in the party don't actually want to be there.
Your job is not only to convince them otherwise, but also to engage 30 people so that they pay attention to you and don't have side conversations. You must interact with everyone, individualising your relationship with each of them accordingly: some may be shy, some curious, some downright drunk and disorderly. Then, once they are gone, you must mark each of the party members on ever-changing criteria, while planning for the next party. And you must do this six times a day.
Teaching is clearly a labour of love, but it is not an inexhaustible one. Shortening the summer holidays, as more and more people are calling for, would be a disaster. Teacher recruitment and retention has already reached crisis point: the vacancy rate is double what it was pre-Covid and six times higher than in 2010. Each year around 40,000 teachers leave the profession, and yet we are missing recruitment targets in almost every single subject: last year only 17 per cent of the required physics teachers were hired.
A Department for Education survey found that a third of teachers and school leaders said they were considering quitting the sector in the next 12 months; for those on the fence, losing some of their summer holidays may be the push they need to explore new pastures.
Reallocating those weeks to October and February – two of the darkest, coldest, wettest months of the year – would hardly improve staff or pupil wellbeing. It makes no sense for students to have more time off over winter, when they would simply fester inside, glued to multiple screens, and then have them sweating away in non air-conditioned classrooms for the whole of July, when the days are longer, lighter and warmer.
Shorter summer holidays would push up the already eye-wateringly expensive premium on holidays out of term time, as parents who want guaranteed European sunshine would be competing for the same four weeks.
Cutting down the summer holidays would make us even more of an international outlier. Many countries with excellent education systems have much longer summer holidays than us: Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal have 12 weeks; Estonia and Finland have 11 weeks; Canada has ten weeks; America and Sweden have nine weeks; while China and South Korea have eight weeks.
Most countries have more public holidays than the UK, and children start school two or three years earlier than lots of other OECD countries. Quantity of education is clearly not the issue here. Shortening the summer holidays would inevitably affect quality though; burnt-out teachers are less effective ones.
Teaching will never be able to compete with the private sector in terms of pay or remote/flexible working options. Holidays, and pensions, therefore need protection now more than ever. The exodus of teachers will only be accelerated if we shorten the summer holiday. Why work in the UK when you can be paid more in Dubai for less time?