Cut school summer holidays, report urges
A four-week break would help disadvantaged students catch up on lost learning, says MP
SCHOOL summer holidays should be cut by two weeks to give disadvantaged children time for extra tuition, ministers have been told.
The additional fortnight of teaching time, which could be spread across the summer and autumn terms, would not only improve pupils’ attainment but would also reduce the childcare burden on parents, according to a new report from the think tank Onward.
The arguments in favour of the current six-week summer holiday as well as long breaks throughout the year are “increasingly difficult to balance with modern working culture”, and are out of step with some of the other highest performing education systems in the world, the report argues.
Research has shown that disadvantaged children are the most likely to fall behind during the summer holidays and that the “holiday learning loss” they experience contributes to the widening of the gap between them and their wealthier peers.
“By breaking up the school holidays into shorter and more manageable parts, evenly distributed across the school year, we can ease the financial burden on families caused by lengthy childcare costs or sacrificing work to do childcare and mediate the socioeconomic inequalities in both physical and mental health,” the think tank says.
Its report, written by Jonathan Gullis, a Tory MP, examines the length of summer holidays in other countries and shows that England is in a minority of developed countries that has such long holidays. In some parts of Asia, including high performing countries like South Korea and Japan, students are only on summer holiday for four weeks.
Meanwhile in Europe there is a wide variation, with pupils in Italy and Portugal typically out of school for up to 13 weeks, while Germany, the Netherlands and Denmark follow the UK’S model of a six-week holiday.
Of the 36 developed nations in the
OECD, nine have shorter school holidays overall than England or Scotland, including Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.
“Longer school holidays don’t do children much good either, with disadvantaged pupils having to spend weeks of the term making up the lost time,” the report says. “If we care about working families, we should help children to catch up on lost learning and parents to catch up on lost earnings by cutting the summer and winter breaks.”
As well as reducing the summer holiday to a month, other holidays such as the Christmas break should also be reduced, the report recommends.
Schools could use the extra term time for structured extra-curricular activities and to give children from deprived backgrounds extra one-to-one tuition in core subjects such as maths and English, which is now needed even more than usual due to the amount of learning that was lost during lockdown.
The Scientific Advisory Group for Emergency (Sage) told the Government earlier this year that children would suffer lifelong damage because of lockdown.