As winter advances, and night comes for us in the mid-afternoon, we teachers have a tendency to look back wistfully to the summer holidays and lament how it breezed by all too quickly. News, then, this week that Welsh ministers have launched a consultation on changes that could see the summer holiday shortened might sound like bad news for my profession, let alone pupils.
But I agree with the proposals. The Welsh government has said that the overall number of teaching days and holiday days across the year wouldn’t be changed. What would happen is that a week would be taken from summer and added to the October break, with potentially another week moved to Easter in the future. They have cited research suggesting the long autumn term is difficult for teachers and students, and crucially that long summer breaks harm students from poorer backgrounds and with additional learning needs.
Many teachers swear that they see pupils starting the new academic year weaker than when they left in those heady days of late July. In classic experiments on forgetting, a German psychologist, Hermann Ebbinghaus, conducted research on himself (not exactly the largest dataset) and concluded that after learning new material, we tend to forget it very quickly. Reviewing material helps to disrupt this steep learning loss. For material to remain stored, however, it must be reviewed multiple times in order to become embedded.
That said, the contemporary research on whether long holidays harm learning doesn’t give an easy answer. Some experts say the effects of the “summer slide” on pupils across the UK are small. One 2022 paper found “worsening mental health and mental health inequalities” in some age cohorts, but “little evidence of widening inequalities in verbal cognitive ability” over the school summer holidays.
For its part, the Welsh government is assuming the worst and acting accordingly. I can’t say I blame it. What’s certainly true is that long summer holidays are a disadvantage for pupils who, along with a pause in structured learning, have to contend with “holiday hunger”. The food poverty charity Fare Share estimates that up to 3 million children are at risk of going hungry over the summer holidays.
A few years ago, I might have been more persuaded by the studies that question the widening of the achievement gap as a result of summer holidays, but that was before Covid and the huge rise in school absences it precipitated. A long summer holiday is exactly what those pupils who are persistently absent and failing to reintegrate well on their return do not need. Shortening the summer break and distributing those weeks elsewhere in the school year at least allows all pupils to remain steadily moored to the rules and routines of their school setting.
The length of the autumn term, coupled with the number of bugs and viruses doing the rounds during this period, also means absence rates for pupils and staff are remarkably high. A lengthened autumn half-term could be welcomed as a necessary ballast against exhaustion and the spread of illness.
Those arguing for the six-week break to remain a permanent fixture might suggest we broaden our understanding of what learning looks like. I agree with that. Learning does not always take place behind rows of desks, but also in trips to museums or galleries and time spent with family, older relatives or friends at the local youth club (if it still exists).
But this laudable vision of summer as an opportunity for a different kind of education is, for so many parents, a pipe dream. And it is not because there isn’t the will. The headache of what to do with the kids over that long month and a half consumes parents who are unable to afford the high cost of a family summer holiday, or who remain home to juggle work and childcare. (The Welsh government has cited the problem of finding affordable paid childcare as a reason for its proposed changes.) What are parents supposed to do when they can’t rely on relatives or friends to look after the kids during the day? They are invariably forced to pay for the few affordable play-schemes and camps on offer, or face very high daily and weekly rates.
A shorter summer break wouldn’t be about rejecting what pupils gain from their time away from the classroom. Rather, it would be a recognition of the diverse realities faced by families – and I’m glad that Wales has started this long overdue conversation. But if that still doesn’t convince you, then remember: there’s always the prospect of cheaper holidays, away from the summer price rises.
Lola Okolosie is an English teacher and writer focusing on race, politics, education and feminism
