It’s easy to wax nostalgic about long summer vacations from school. Back in the day, they meant disappearing on bikes with friends until the sun went down, or setting up makeshift camps in the yard with hastily thrown together picnics of buttered bread, orange squash, and the odds and ends of the snack drawer.
Times have changed, however. These days, summer vacation can be a stressful mix of paying for expensive childcare, negotiating with employers for time off work, and relying on grandparents—sometimes with an expensive break in between.
That’s partly why the Welsh government recently considered cutting the summer holiday from six to five weeks, and adding an extra week to the autumn half-term holiday to compensate. The idea was rejected last month. If it had been approved, the country would have been an outlier – some countries even treat their children to a 13-week summer holiday, making our six seem rather stingy.
School’s out (for some)
Non-Christian countries, of course, don’t base their shorter school holidays on Christmas and Easter, but almost all countries give their children longer holidays at some point during the year. Even in South Korea, where pupils spend around 220 days in the classroom, according to the US National Center on Education and the Economy (NCEE) – 30 more than British children – most schools have six-week summer holidays.
Although children in some countries do not have holidays in July and August, this is because their holidays are linked to the local seasons. For example, Thai children have a long holiday from March to May to escape the heat. In Australia, they have their longest holiday at the end of the year.
Meanwhile, in the UK, two-week autumn half-term holidays in October have been quietly introduced by the London Borough of Bromley and many private schools. They can work well for those planning to holiday abroad, as prices are often considerably lower. For example, a Jet2 holiday to the HD Parque Cristobal hotel in Gran Canaria currently costs £3,412 for a family of four in August; during the autumn half-term, the same holiday costs £2,268.
Short and sweet?
The length of the summer holidays is often blamed on the fact that schoolchildren had to work in the fields during their free time, but the weather has always played a role. Summer holidays offered a respite from the heat of the Victorian classroom – and with many schools still housed in poorly equipped, older buildings, they continue to do so. However, British critics have long argued that longer summer holidays are bad for working families and can even affect children’s education and mental health.
Francis Jones, former teacher and now CEO of Stem At Home, studied PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment) scores and concluded that there is a link between exam results and the amount of time spent in school.
“In general, the shorter the school holidays and the more time children actually spend in school, the higher the quality of education in the country,” he says. “There are outliers like Estonia and Canada, but overall the top 25 countries show a correlation between a child’s education and school holidays.”
Conversely, NCEE found no clear correlation in a 2018 study. “There is no consistent pattern for the number of school days per year, the length of school vacations, or even the length of an average school day among the highest-performing education systems, suggesting that when it comes to student achievement, what matters more than the amount of time students spend in the classroom is how that time is spent,” the organization said in a statement at the time.
However, numbers aren’t everything. Education consultant and former deputy headteacher Ruth Lue-Quee believes the long summer break provides invaluable time for learning through play and shared family experiences, especially for younger children. “I personally find that children benefit from being with their parents, having time to be free, having time to travel, explore and do the things that they can’t really do in the four walls of a classroom,” she says.
She is also a big advocate of family holidays in the summer. “Even if you take your kids to Wales or a caravan, that quality time together is priceless.”
Welsh weather
It is the Welsh bank holidays that some local campaigners are concerned about. Before the changes were rejected, an open letter signed by organisations including The Welsh Association of Visitor Attractions (WAVA) highlighted the potential impact the government’s plan would have on visitor numbers.
“Many attractions take more than 45 per cent of their total annual income during the school summer holidays, and any loss of summer income would result in closures and job losses. If we were to cut a key summer week into an extra week in the autumn half-term, it would mean a loss of tens of thousands of pounds for many Welsh attractions. In addition, the last two autumn half-terms have been hit by huge storms, forcing some attractions to close,” the report said.
Lue-Quee suggests that one solution might be to allow parents to take their children out of school to go on holiday during term time, possibly with an allotment of 14 days that they could take whenever they wanted. A similar system was in place until 2013 for pupils with good attendance, but councils now issue fines for such trips and these can be rigorously enforced.
Work problems
While other countries are also imposing fines for absence, they may also be better equipped to deal with a longer summer holiday. In Italy, for example, only half of Italian women are employed (the 2022 figure), compared to 72 per cent in the UK, meaning the extended 13-week summer holiday is likely to cause fewer childcare issues.
Meanwhile, Stockholm in Sweden, where the employment rate is comparable to that of the UK, has an income-related scheme. column (camp) scheme with a formal application process in February for children in Years 1-9. At the residential farm camps, which cost between £0 and £28 per day depending on family income, children can try their hand at fishing, drama and sports and help with chores such as cooking and cleaning.
By contrast, British families face huge summer childcare costs. A 2023 study by charity Coram Family and Childcare found that it cost an average of £943 per child to pay for holiday care. “What we need in the UK is a national provision that can support parents with the length of the summer holidays, but also the flexibility to go on holiday at different times,” says Lue-Quee.
This article was first published in February 2024 and has been revised and updated.