So this morning I woke up to a new future. No, not the UK’s departure from Europe. This is all about me. I’m on holidays for six and a half weeks and I deserve it. Non-teachers bristle; their eyes roll. Fair enough. I’m going to be on a sun lounger in about forty eight hours so bristle away.
Secretly, though, I’m coming round to the fact that the summer holidays are unnecessarily long and if we are to tackle the serious problems with poverty we are all aware of, we need to do something more than just wring our hands and shake our heads.
This week I’ve had numerous conversations with students about their holidays: some heading off to Florida, to Europe, to London; some heading to caravans around Scotland; some going nowhere, playing X-box. The disparity is obvious. Some grabbing books from school and class libraries; some vowing to never read a page until they return in August. Poverty is not something that can be solved in schools alone; it is a societal problem in a society that, thus far, has been bereft of any workable ideas as to how to ‘narrow the gap’. Throwing money at it has never worked. So we need to be brave and bold.
Our more well-off students will continue their educations over the summer. They can afford to travel, to visit, to learn. Our economically-deprived students can’t do that. They often have to take even more time off during term-time because holidays are cheaper. Our rigid approach to school breaks means the holiday companies can, quite openly, often double the price of that fortnight in Greece. With twelve weeks holiday a year there is no reason we can’t shorten our summer holidays to make that window smaller.
A four week summer holidays is still vastly longer than most people get. The final two weeks of term could be given over to activities/ trips and those who wanted to use that for a family holiday could do so. We, in effect, shorten the time our most vulnerable children are out of school at any one time, with added fortnights thorough the year. Still twelve weeks; just utilised in a more valuable way.
Oh, I know you’ll shudder at that thought after such a hard year. But think about it. More breaks throughout the year might mean we are less stressed at specific times. We can plan for proper breaks and, dare I say it, time to step away. It’s a bold and not original suggestion but if we’re serious about doing our bit to tackle poverty then we need to be radical in our thinking. The accepted structures of our society embed that poverty. So we must change for them not for us. We must do something.
I’m already feeling the benefits of my summer holidays. I’m packing. But this way isn’t working so let’s be brave and less self-serving. Poverty isn’t a school problem but it is something we can help change. Perhaps the way we live and work needs to be transformed if we are serious about the lives of all of our young people. Perhaps it’s time for that.