There’s no point to term-time holidays if there’s homework too
Itook my children out of school last Friday for what I thought was a treat, but now realise was actually an “enrichment” opportunity. This is a brandnew category of holiday – one that isn’t a holiday at all, and must on no account be regarded as such – invented by the headmaster of a school in Essex.
From next year, pupils at Woodlands secondary school in Basildon will be allowed to take a whole week off during term time, as long as they can demonstrate that they have learned something from the experience. “Enrichment week” will fall between 15 and 19 July, permitting parents to take advantage of cheaper travel costs out of peak season.
To some extent, it’s an admission of defeat. The introduction of fines has not prevented families, at Woodlands or elsewhere, from taking bargain holidays in term time. There were 8.4 million unauthorised absences in the summer months of the last academic year – up from 7.4 million the previous year. Scattergun absences create a huge headache for teachers, who have to help each pupil catch up. It makes sense to offer families a single, non-transferrable week in which to play truant.
But instead of just calling it a holiday and lopping a week off the bloated summer furlough, headteacher Simon Cox is determined that his pupils use the time for selfimprovement. To prove it, they must complete an educational booklet itemising all the knowledge they have accrued.
“If, for example, a family went to Greece, we’d need to see that they have mastered some basic communication,” says Cox. “For geography we’d need to see key information around GDP and population, for history, the type of place and how the past has impacted. English would be about literature, and maths will centre around currency.”
Hard though it is to forgive a man – let alone a teacher – who uses impact as a verb, Mr Cox is right about one thing. Holidays don’t have to be an educational void. Last Friday, while idling down a Norfolk lane whacking nettles with a stick, my son spotted a tunnel-shaped spiderweb on a bush. We consulted Professor Google and discovered that the Labyrinth spider, while disappointingly undeadly, is an architectural genius, building a spiralling labyrinth around her eggs to protect them from predators.
A bit further along, we met a dog with a curious, pom-pom shaped growth sprouting from its back. This led to a conversation about cell growth, cancer and death. After that, as we nervously edged our way round a field of bullocks, we talked about why castrated animals are less aggressive, and how hormones affect the human body.
This sort of free-range gathering of knowledge, driven by curiosity and therefore likely to stick, is impossible to replicate in the classroom. Which is not to say that school is pointless. Far from it: there is lots of essential knowledge that cannot be foraged from hedgerows. No one ever picked up their times tables in the wild.
But neither, let’s face it, would any normal child concern themselves with “key information around GDP” while floating in the Aegean under a fierce Greek sky. To have to make currency calculations in a booklet, when you could be learning to skim stones or hunting for scorpions in the dust? That seems the very opposite of enriching.