Work or play: should you give your kids the summer off ?

Two mothers discuss whether their children will enjoy a six-week break, or will be playing post-lockdown catch-up

Parents across the UK are divided about whether to give their locked-down children six weeks of holiday or to carry on teaching in the hope of making up ground lost when schools closed. Here, two mothers make their case for how the summer should be spent.

FUN! SAYS ANNA TURNS: ‘I WON’T LET MY DAUGHTER NEAR A TEXTBOOK’

I cannot wait to log off Google Classroom and get my daughter away from the screen. I’m aware that some parents are planning to use the summer as a chance to catch up on lessons, and practise spellings, fractions or times tables, but I won’t be letting my eightyear-old daughter, Ella, go near a textbook, online or off.

For the next six weeks, I want her to play, relax and grow in confidence. To splash around on the beach, paddleboard, go rock pooling and hang out in the garden with her friends. We both need time to sit still, pause and really take stock.

Education has been such a mixed bag in recent months – some parents haven’t heard a peep from their child’s school and are horrified by the lack of input, so they might want to use the summer as catch-up time.

But while I still worry about the longterm impact of missing real school for six months, I can see the flipside. Lockdown learning has been intense and having this summer off is crucial to restoring an equilibrium. It’s time to prioritise our mental health above anything else.

Since lockdown began, my family and I have been in survival mode, as have so many other people. Both my husband, Chris, and I have been working full-time in shifts – he runs a boat business and I’m an environmental journalist – tag-teaming without any childcare while doing our best to stay on top of numerous daily school assignments and, most importantly, keep our children (Ella and Stanley, four) feeling calm, happy and secure. No easy task during a global pandemic. I always joked I’d never be patient enough to homeschool – and now having had this thrust upon me since March, I certainly haven’t been persuaded otherwise. Adopting a supply teacher role – having never qualified with a postgraduate certificate in education – with no advanced notice, experience or choice has been the most enormous challenge.

While constantly striving to stimulate, inspire and provide the best opportunities for Ella, some mornings have felt like Groundhog Day, trying to persuade her to concentrate on a maths question online instead of gazing out of the window at the birds, or battling to encourage her to keep her handwriting as neat as possible. Some of our conversations seem to play on repeat without getting any easier. There have been times that we’ve sat together at the laptop, both having meltdowns while the sunshine beckons outside.

Of course, I’m grateful to the wonderful teachers who have been proactively sending us work every day, streaming celebration assemblies via video and even calling sometimes to listen to my daughter read, but I’m sure this is not a scenario any of them would have chosen either.

I’m choosing full-time holiday mode because teaching has been tough, and it’s the impact that these past few months will have had on our children’s emotional, social and mental development that worries me the most.

I’ve heard this pandemic being referred to as a collective trauma – but while we’ve been in our respective silos during lockdown, children have not had the chance to relate to their peers in order to make sense of this weird new world around them. School is a place where children can interact, play together, learn from each other, share experiences and ideas. Completing tasks remotely won’t replicate this.

Looking back at this crazy rollercoaster, the highlights of our kitchen table curriculum have not been watching BBC Bitesize Daily, learning to count in Spanish or investigating the finer points of Viking timelines. I’ve been much more relaxed and Ella much more animated and enthusiastic when “teaching” has been a two-way process led by her.

That spontaneous learning might be triggered by a discussion about whether to be vegetarian, her concerned observations on the metamorphosis of five very hungry caterpillars, or her fascination as she dissected the barn owl pellets a kind friend sent to us to discover the most delicate rodent skeletons inside. That’s why I’m confident that this six weeks of summer will be so precious this year: time to escape the screens completely, reconnect with best friends from a safe distance and appreciate everything that we have right here on our doorstep, away from the crowds.

It’s our chance to let Ella be more creative and explore outdoors, away from regimented timetables and overwhelming checklists of academic tasks. As and when the chance arises, I’ll nurture Ella’s natural curiosity and help to develop her critical thinking ability but this will be free-form, not prescribed.

Of course, I can help her to develop her own ideas, learn that making mistakes is OK and find her own voice. But right now, she doesn’t need to learn any more facts from a textbook.

We’re all looking forward to starting a new term in September – and the Vikings will still be there, I’m sure.

In the meantime, we won’t be plugging into any more online learning resources. We’ll be switching off and recharging our own batteries.

STUDY! SAYS ZOE HUGHES: ‘THE FUTURE REWARD WILL SPEAK FOR ITSELF’

As adults, if we work in an office and take two weeks off for a holiday to the Costa del Sol, we might feel we have completely forgotten how to use Excel when we come back. The whole point of that holiday is to switch off our brains. When we return, we have to fire them back up again, and that’s not easy.

For a whole generation of schoolchildren, the past few months have been so disrupted for most of them that switching off their brains is not the problem – it’s the reignition. Particularly as some will honestly admit they haven’t been engaged in any kind of meaningful education since March.

So saying that youngsters now need another six weeks off is potentially going to hold them back even further. In fact, I suggest that July and August offer an unprecedented opportunity to prepare all children for the school year ahead – and not just in English and maths.

After all, the academic year ahead (2020-21) could face further disruption, with the potential risk of local lockdowns or a second wave of infections. Whether pupils are ready or not, exams will still be taking place, from Sats to Alevels. We have this small window of extra time this summer in which to make the most of opportunities to catch up. Why waste it?

As a tutor, I already know that there are many valid ways to ensure children get a full and rounded education – not just at school. Most of my clients are “Eotas” (educated other than at school) and they usually continue tuition with me throughout the summer.

I’ve noticed this year that most of the children I teach who are normally educated in school are also booking in for two or three sessions with me per week for the holidays, because their parents are concerned about how much education they have missed during lockdown. I’ll be taking a “little and often” approach to my 12-year-old son Wyatt’s learning throughout the summer holidays. We’ll aim for an hour a day of structured work and at least one day off a week. We won’t be simply hitting the books like an education boot camp. He’d hate to be lectured or forced to sit at a desk all summer; he’ll be taught without it being a chore.

I will be mindfully ensuring that his summer holidays are much more educational than they would otherwise have been, because I’m very aware that during another six weeks off, it would be easy to get out of that learning mindset. Of course, children need a break, but even paddleboarding counts as education if you include learning about the tides, balance and the ability to float, as does grocery shopping when you incorporate budgeting.

Experiential learning is so valid and I would argue crucial to children getting a holistic education.

Visiting National Trust locations is a huge part of our holidays too and gives us a chance to really bring history topics to life.

I’m hoping he’ll be able to attend a watersports camp for a week, possibly a computing workshop, and I’ll get him involved with some DIY woodwork so he understands how to write good instructions and use tools safely.

And if Wyatt’s friends arrange to play football in the park, joining them will be a priority over study, which can be moved to accommodate socialising. Plus, I’ll make sure he has plenty of time for gaming, watching anime and drawing the characters he loves.

Wyatt is in year seven; he goes to a good secondary school in Exeter, but I pulled him out a week before lockdown because the writing was on the wall as far as I was concerned.

Schools are germ factories and I’m surprised it took the Government so long to shut them down. His school has been really supportive throughout, but I don’t trust this Government to manage his education appropriately, so I’m taking matters into my own hands to ensure that I keep that steady trickle of education happening for my child.

I do feel much more in tune with how Wyatt is learning and where the gaps in his knowledge are.

When lockdown began, we started off by gently introducing the concept of school at home. When school first tried to operate the normal timetable with five sessions a day, Wyatt found the time pressures really stressful and live lessons intimidating.

Also, as a single parent, it was difficult being on Zoom, teaching other people’s children, while Wyatt was trying to log on to online lessons.

In half-term, the school changed the timetable to focus only on maths, English and science, and Wyatt has been setting his own routine. Usually, he’s been working for about three hours each day.

It’s important to say that what we’ve been doing – and what we’ll be doing over the summer – is not home educating – this type of “school at home” is very different to deregistering your child from permanent school so that they are always taught at home.

Home education can be much more difficult to carry out without the resources and organised groups that Eotas incorporates. Home educating is also difficult when you’re biologically linked to the person you’re trying to teach.

Trust me, I have previously educated both my children at home (my eldest is now nearly 18). I have my PGCE, I’m an experienced teacher and private tutor, but it can still be tough going when it’s your own.

I do appreciate the effort required to maintain the study momentum over the holidays, but I believe the future reward will speak for itself.

There is a middle path here (hence my business is called “Betwixt”) that allows education to be a fun interlude to an otherwise monotonous six weeks, in which many children do very little.

‘Even paddleboarding counts as education if you include learning about the tides’

Many children have been unable to meet friends since March. Main, Anna Turns and her daughter Ella at Salcombe, Devon, with Zoe Hughes and her son Wyatt

Lockdown has forced many parents to teach their children from the kitchen table