As Wales’ new Education Minister Lynne Neagle starts her brief one of the matters in her inbox will be proposals to change the school year dates and cut short the six week summer holidays. Results of a public consultation on that are due soon but the changes, which include a five or four week summer break, are opposed by all education unions in Wales who wrote a joint letter to her predecessor Jeremy Miles saying so,
More than 4,000 people have signed a petition calling on the Welsh Government to halt its proposals to change the school year dates. But some local authorities in England have already cut their summer holidays, to good effect they say, and others are being urged to follow suit.
Social mobility professor Lee Elliot Major is among those who believe a shorter summer holiday and having terms of more even lengths - taking the weeks at other times - would be better for children and school staff. He says the traditional long summer break had nothing to do with the harvest and was actually demanded by wealthy classes who wanted longer holidays for their children.
In the harsh realities of the post pandemic era, it’s time to reassess whether our longest standing traditions in education could be changed to serve us better. Among these, the school calendar, largely unchanged since the Victorian era, warrants a review.
Many believe that our long summer break came from the need for children to help farmers with the harvest in centuries gone by. But the practice is more likely to originate from the extended summer holidays required by the Victorian professional classes.
Like so much else, reluctance to reform our unbalanced school calendar is preserving the preferences of a privileged few from a bygone era. The idea of spreading school holidays more evenly across the year is first and foremost about improving the working lives of teachers.
The infamously long and arduous autumn term, with its relentless push towards Christmas, is notoriously draining for both teachers and pupils. A two week respite replacing the current week break in October would enable time poor teachers to reset, reinvigorating them for the rest of the year.
