Yes, they're hurting your child's education
The summer holidays are nearly here, and with them the chance for children and teachers to truly relax after a long academic year. It also means parents are scrambling to make sure that they have childcare arrangements in hand, and checking that they are covered for the extra expense which comes with having their children at home for six weeks.
Many of us look back fondly on the long summer breaks of our youth. But as more and more teachers leave the profession citing burnout, and the cost of living and inflexible working conditions make things harder for parents, the wisdom of keeping the traditional break is less clear.
So, should we get rid of the six-week summer holiday? Teacher Nadeine Asbali, father James Dixon and education academic Lee Elliot Major give their perspectives.
Ask any teacher on a dreary February afternoon how many school weeks there are until the summer holidays, and they’d likely be able to tell you the exact number. It feels like the prospect of that glorious July day where we actually get to spill out of the school gates at the same time as the students, for once unburdened by a pile of marking or the stress of planning tomorrow’s lessons, hangs enticingly on the horizon, edging ever closer from the moment the school bell first rings in September.
It’s no wonder really. Teacher burnout is at an all-time high. Last year’s Teacher Wellbeing Index revealed that teacher wellbeing in the UK has dropped to its lowest since 2019: 76 per cent of education staff reported experiencing workplace stress, with 77 per cent showing symptoms of poor mental health directly caused by their jobs.
It has become common for teachers like me to watch our colleagues, and ourselves, crumbling as the year progresses. By the time the stress of exam period is done in May or June, it can often feel like a slow and painful crawl to the end of the year. When the one-week half-term breaks fly by in a flash of marking, planning, laundry and life admin – and when Christmas and Easter are often busy with family events and commitments and still the same marking, planning, laundry and life admin – it often feels like teachers are forced to wait all year for a semblance of a proper rest.
Not only is this unhealthy and unsustainable, but when compared to jobs that allow perks like working from home or actual autonomy over when you get to book time off, it’s likely to only add to the already record-high numbers of teachers leaving the profession.
Given this, it’s perhaps surprising that this particular burnt-out teacher is sympathetic to the growing argument in favour of a shorter summer holiday. But hear me out.
A marginally shorter holiday in July and August – say, four weeks – would still be enough time to fully recuperate but also allow for two extra weeks to be freed up and added elsewhere in the school calendar. That long slog between September and Christmas could be split into three stints rather than two. Or perhaps Easter could become a three-week holiday. Or each week-long half-term break could become 10 days instead.
This could mean that teachers like me don’t feel like we are hanging on by a thread at this point of the year – allowing the people charged with educating the next generation to look after themselves a little too.
It’s not all about the benefits for teachers, though. Every year in September, my colleagues and I see the same thing, no matter which year groups we teach. Children who have regressed over the past six weeks. Facts that they could recount in July have now disappeared. Blank stares replace lightbulb moments. Many students return for the start of the academic year unable to sit still, incapable of staying awake for the duration of a lesson. The first few weeks of term often feel like they are wasted reteaching basic concepts that already seemed embedded just a month and a half before.
The thing is, that nostalgic image we cling onto as a cultural cornerstone – of the sort of summer spent outside in a haze of sticky ice cream palms, long bike rides and water fights in the street, where the days simply melt into one – mostly doesn’t exist anymore. Not for most young people anyway.
Before I became a mother, I was baffled by why children regressed so much in a relatively short space of time, but now that I have two young children, I’m not surprised this is the case. Six weeks is a gargantuan amount of time to fill with structure and stimulation for your child – and that’s without the issue of having to sort out childcare for parents who work full time throughout the summer. Many non-teacher friends of mine have to fork out thousands of pounds for extra holiday clubs and camps just to keep their kids cared for and occupied for the month and a half.
Parents navigating challenges like poverty simply cannot fund this and so many of the students in the schools I’ve taught in spend their summers in front of a screen – not because their families don’t care, but because there’s nothing else for them to do and nowhere else for them to go.
It’s no wonder, when the streets aren’t deemed safe, child-friendly spaces are inaccessible or expensive and places like youth centres have been decimated. And more tragically, they return from summer having regressed but sit alongside more privileged peers who spent their summers soaking in all the cultural capital of a foreign holiday.
Moving from a six-week to a four-week summer holiday may well be the answer to these problems – allowing the most disadvantaged to cling onto the vital learning they have developed across the school year whilst offering teachers and pupils alike the much-needed time to truly rest and recuperate.