A revolution in school planning would help give parents a break

THE final days of the summer term at my primary school provided nothing more challenging than playing board games.

A palpable sense of anticipation grew for the long break ahead and the pace of lessons noticeably slackened.

Nothing much has changed since the 1980s, except that the classrooms in the run-up to summer are a little emptier than they used to be.

As we reported yesterday, nearly 100,000 pupils missed school in the last week of term, in June, in a mass exodus motivated by the price hikes inflicted on families by airlines and holiday firms.

In total, 13.8 per cent of Scotland’s 684,415 pupils were marked as being off – meaning 94,449 children disappeared from their desks while school was still in session.

In some cases, this situation isn’t helped by the way the school year is structured. For example, term may finish at lunchtime on a Tuesday and a one-and-a-half-day week barely seems worth the trouble.

True, as the stakes get higher in secondary school every day counts but, even so, it seems unlikely that the future course of a pupil’s education will hinge on something learned in the last few days of the year.

But economics are hard to argue with, even if Education Secretary John Swinney has described the holiday market as ‘broken’.

Package holiday firms are unlikely to drop plans for yet more eye-watering price increases purely because of political pressure.

Fines for parents who take their children out of school for unauthorised breaks are issued south of the Border, but not here. As the practice hasn’t addressed the problem there, it’s hard to see how it would work in Scotland.

What is really ‘broken’ is the sclerotic management of the state school system which operates in the way it does for no reason other than that it always has.

This may be to do with teachers being determined to safeguard their lengthy summer break – a shake-up of the way the school year is organised may well put that at risk.

The profession is so heavily unionised that any meaningful alteration to working practices seems almost impossible.

There are legal requirements for the number of days schools have to open (hence those awkward one-and-a-half-day weeks), but technically it’s up to councils to decide the structure of the week and when schools should open.

Mr Swinney has launched a ‘governance review’ of schools which should lead to greater powers for headteachers over educational attainment, choosing school staff and deciding curriculum content.

It has been a shambolic, jargon-ridden process that quickly lost the faith of parents and, indeed, many teachers and local authorities – and it hasn’t tackled the question of schools being able to set their own term times.

Organised

But the tumbleweed drifting through many of our classrooms in late June should force a re-think: is there really any reason why individual headteachers, particularly in the primary sector, couldn’t set their own holidays?

Why not shift the mid-term October break to another month altogether, or move the Easter holiday forward or back, or have a series of shorter breaks rather than the lengthy summer holiday, which can cost parents a fortune in childcare?

It could be organised on a local authority basis so that holiday policies differ according to council jurisdictions – at the moment there are only slight variations.

This approach would make it impossible for holiday firms to introduce blanket price hikes. Properly managed, it could prove a way of combating those immutable market forces that Mr Swinney believes have left the holiday market so ‘broken’. More radically, why not book holidays for your child as you would book a holiday at work?

Obviously, there would be restrictions forbidding time off at certain stages of the year, for example during exam season. Any ground lost educationally could be made up in after-school catch-up sessions, or even online – after all, university degrees can now be studied in their entirety on the web.

As former council education director Keir Bloomer observes, ‘serious consideration has never been given to what would be most educationally beneficial or, indeed, what would best serve families’ needs’.

And it’s not all about cheap holidays – Mr Bloomer points out that research shows educational attainment slipping after extended holiday periods.

He told me: ‘The worstaffected are disadvantaged children because their families are less able to afford the range of stimulating experiences that help to sustain learning when school is not available.

‘Some studies in the US even suggest that most, if not all, of the “attainment gap” between rich and poor can be attributed to this cause.’

But there is a more fundamental question about how schools operate, which seems entirely divorced from the reality of most people’s lives.

Why is pick-up time so much earlier than the end of many parents’ working days – and why is the start of the school day generally at the same time many of us are expected to report for duty at our workplace?

Bosses are becoming more flexible about how their employees work – but schools are largely wedded to the 9am to 3pm day.

I’ve never met a teacher who didn’t proclaim that their contracted 35-hour week – agreed under the last Labour-led Scottish Executive – was a myth; they complain that they normally have to work a lot more.

But many would consider more flexible hours if they were rewarded for their efforts – why not have bonus payments for those who are proven to be doing a good job, based on exam results?

For the Left-wing teaching unions, this thoroughly capitalist scheme would be unpalatable. If even half of what I propose above was included in a government consultation, threats of industrial action would follow.

Solutions

Indeed, the sole purpose of the Educational Institute of Scotland, the biggest teachers’ union, seems to be issuing knee-jerk strike threats, which makes it a powerful force – but not for the better.

It is dedicated to preserving a failed status quo which rejects local solutions or departures from the received orthodoxy of comprehensive education passed down through the generations (the one that has left us with Scottish pupils lagging behind their counterparts in former Soviet bloc nations).

Dr Graham Hawley, headmaster of fee-paying Loretto School in Musselburgh, East Lothian, believes that state schools could benefit from the same freedom to run their affairs as independent schools enjoy.

He said: ‘It’s rare to go more than two or three years without some sort of changes imposed by the state, whether it’s to the exam system or the curriculum.’

Giving headteachers more power is a step in the right direction, but the SNP’s proposed reforms are nowhere near as radical as they sound.

Mr Swinney’s intervention on term-time holidays – really an exercise in fence-sitting – masks a much wider problem in Scottish education, which is a pathological aversion to change.