Episode 175: How long should summer holidays be?

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School podcast.

Welcome to the School of School podcast.

Robin Potter

Welcome to another episode of the School of School podcast. I am here with my friends, Andy and Adam. Hello, you two.

Adam Gifford

Robin, how are you?

Andy Psarianos

We're in the same room.

Adam Gifford

This is one of those unique occasions where we're we've got two in close proximity in one half. Well, not quite half world away, but a chunk over the water anyway.

Robin Potter

Absolutely.

Adam Gifford

So this is good. This is good news.

Robin Potter

I always love it when we can get together. Now it's been a while since the three of us did this, but it has, this is a good day started off right?

Adam Gifford

Yeah. Brilliant.

Robin Potter

And the funny thing is it's also the beginning of summer holidays for the UK, but-

Andy Psarianos

We've been on summer holidays forever already.

Robin Potter

This is true. So our kids by mid-June are finished. So that kind of brings up a really good topic to talk about, which is how long should summer holidays be?

Adam Gifford

Can I just ask a question, Robin, when you say this, I think that we will jump straight to this topic, but when you say mid-June, is that across the board? Is that primary, secondary, everyone finishes at the same time generally?

Robin Potter

Yes.

Adam Gifford

Is that how it works?

Robin Potter

Yeah, within give a couple of weeks, I'd say. High schools might be a little earlier because of exams.

Andy Psarianos

Independent schools usually break up earlier, right?

Robin Potter

Yeah,

Andy Psarianos

Sure.

Robin Potter

But not much.

Adam Gifford

Yeah, same here.

Robin Potter

Not much so, but sometime in June. What do you think? Are our holidays too long? Are they too short?

Adam Gifford

This to me is a really interesting topic actually. And the first thing I've got to say is I always think it is incredible that children get looked after when so many children are off for such an extended period of time where you've got working parents. I always found it staggering this sort of mass organisation of children to be looked after takes place. I was always genuinely astounded by that because it is a chunk of time. I mean, in the UK you're looking roughly around the five-week mark. That's a lot of time for your children to be at home. And so, I don't know, do you have personal experiences you two about how you feel about it? Is it too long over summer? Should it be broken up more evenly? What's the story?

Andy Psarianos

I don't think it's too long. I mean, this is my childhood. I just remember having these long, endless summers where we learned how to be bored, I guess is one of the things. You think, because a lot of the times we were doing stuff and we're organised, but I just remember just having all it seemed like all the time in the world and by the end of the summers it was like going back to school was exciting. It was like, oh yeah, I knew I'm going to have a new teacher. It's a new year, it's going to be exciting.

Robin Potter

See your friends that maybe you hadn't seen for months.

Andy Psarianos

You hadn't seen them in for forever, right? Yeah. It's been months since you've seen your friends and you had all these stories to tell about all, and people changed too, right? At that age, it's like you've gone away for a quarter over a year basically for summer holidays-

Robin Potter

Come back a foot taller.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. People come back and they have suntans and they're taller and yeah, exactly.

Adam Gifford

Well, can I ask you another question? Because something that you hear in schools occasionally is that, oh, the kids have come back and we've got to sort of catch up and do this sort of stuff. Let me ask you a question. It's a very open, almost loaded question, I suppose. Did you learn much when you were now, I mean learning in the broader sense, right? I just don't mean that the sort of reading, writing, arithmetic, but did you learn much over the school holidays over to you guys?

Andy Psarianos

I mean, I think I learned how to be independent over those long school holidays because look, okay, it was an interesting situation at my place because my mother was working at the university doing administrative work and my father was a taxi driver. So what happened was summer holidays a couple of days later we're all thrown in the car and we drove off to the coast somewhere. Usually, so anywhere between, so growing up in eastern North America and Montreal was usually somewhere in the states and we'd go to anywhere between, let's say Atlantic City all the way down to the tip of Florida on the east coast. So I've spent my summers on beaches wandering about just making up stuff to do because I didn't even have friends, my friends weren't with me and we would go for the whole summer, sometimes. We'd be gone, literally we'd show up a week before school started. So I just found stuff to do on the beach. So I am still to this day the world's best body surfer because I-

Robin Potter

Had to hear this so many times.

Andy Psarianos

Yeah, we'll have a competition body surfing competition sometime. Anyway, so I half-jokingly said I learned how to be bored, but I did. It is kind of like you had to figure out what you were going to do.

Robin Potter

Okay. So I think that's changed a little bit. I do think that now it's hard for kids to be bored because their lives are so structured. There's always, everything's been planned. But I would say one consistent thing, at least here is that because we are off for so long, if you don't have parents that are available and they could take you to the beach all summer, then what we have is are things like day camp, or summer camp where you go away and your parents then can continue to work and do whatever and off you go to summer camp. And I used to go to camp, sleepover camp, and it was amazing. We do these out trips where you're canoeing for days and camping or you're just learning skills down at the waterfront or you're doing survival skills, whatever it is. You're just having that camp experience with other kids your age and it's very special. It was a special time in my life and kids go on to be counsellors and all of that. So I would say you're learning just as much just in a different context.

Adam Gifford

And I agree and I completely agree, and I think sometimes when we talk about learning, it tends to be framed in the subjects that we look at at school and the fact that learning happens outside of that as well. And in fact, how many people go on to follow those passions that they may have picked up in those times outside of school. Now that's not always the case. I know that school provide lots of opportunities to do certain things, but I'd suggest that loads of people get to pursue the things that they really enjoy doing when they're not at school. And so you've heard me bang on about learning hobbies before, or I read an article this morning, so I don't know when this is being aired, but I read an article about, and I may have talked about it for a woman called Sky Brown who's a young athlete.

She's a skateboarder, she lives in the States but competes for Britain. I think her father might be British, she's 16 years old, but she's been on the pro circuit since she's been about 10. And I read this really interesting article with her because she's homeschooled, but she follows these pursuits. Now she's in a position, I guess not everyone's going to be in that position, but what I've found staggering was the kind of all of the different things that she did. So some things were skateboarding and surfing and you think, okay, those go together. But she was always also really interested in teaching and teaching and learning and some of these other pursuits. And I was thinking, here's someone that has the space to structure this learning in such a way that she follows what she does. And I know it's quite a sort of extreme example because there are very few people that would have the financial backing through sponsors and all those sorts of things.

But it just makes me think actually the learning that takes place when you are bored, Andy, you go and do whatever you did. I know as a kid in New Zealand, I'd go into the bush or people the forest or whatever and you'd start to see how things work. You'd start to notice the birds that follow you because they wanted the insects that you kick up when you're walking along. Just those sorts of things. And I just think that actually, I think there's a richness to it. I think that you can, and I know that's not every kid's experience and not suggesting it's all fully idyllic, but I just think that learning happens all the time. And it's not just the subjects in school that we base good learning on. I think that's probably my point.

Andy Psarianos

No, I think you're absolutely right. But I think some of the, well, let's talk about some of the challenges. So challenges for parents. So summer camp for Robin and I got taken away, and I'm talking about when I was small, but when I became a teenager and I wasn't going on holiday with my parents anymore, I was working at those summer camps, and that was a rite of passage as well. So whether it was day camp or summer camp, that was a job that you could get when you were 15 or 16 and you had a lot of fun. You were working with a bunch of other 16 year olds telling a whole bunch of little kids what to do, which was kind of fun and teach them how to canoe or sail or whatever.

That was great experience. And actually you learn how to mentor and teach and be patient and all those kinds of things, which are all really important life skills. But flip it around, I mean, if you're an inner city kid and both your parents work very, very tough jobs that are demanding require being up early in the morning and coming home late at night. Yeah, it's a whole different thing. That's a challenge, right?

Adam Gifford

Yeah, totally. And I think the most, oh, sorry, you go and keep going.

Andy Psarianos

No, and I think on the flip side of that too, that the argument that you often hear from, I've often heard from teachers is that kids forget stuff over the summer. And if you are gone for that long period of time, you got to reteach them a whole bunch of stuff. I would argue that that's not really-

Robin Potter

The case?

Andy Psarianos

That big of an issue, but whatever it a thing I think that has, if we were talk about education, that is one of the things that you hear a lot, right? People are worried about.

Adam Gifford

Yeah. I think the other thing that I noticed was, I'm just going to use the term most vulnerable. Those children whose home lives are pretty tough. School provides that consistency and just to put it blunt, the safety. And so when the school holidays happen, it's always the time. If you say goodbye at the end of the school year as a teacher, or someone working in school, if you are with these children, it's always, you're a bit nervous because you don't know. And that is a long time and it is one that, like I said at the very beginning, I wasn't being flippant. It is like you're saying, very difficult if you have to go to work, how do you make sure that your children are kind of doing what they should be doing, or they're safe, and they're fed and all that sort of stuff for five weeks, six weeks. That can be really tricky. Especially you might have the income to do something that's that sort of supervised activity.

Andy Psarianos

So maybe, I think that that could be compensated for with community programmes. I know those things cost money, but I think that that's good thing for communities, especially urban communities to invest in YMCA or, where there is a day camp.

Adam Gifford

Camp, yeah. Well we used to run those camps at the school, but they weren't overnighters. They were sort of nine to fivers. And we would always have some children that we've talked to various different people involved to say, "We're going to make it available to you because that would be just the right thing to do really."

Andy Psarianos

Yeah. And even if it's just come over and do sports and teams and arts and crafts and just fun stuff. The kids that are a safe place for them to go where maybe they can get an apple and a banana or something without having to, yeah. That I think is a, so you can take care of things like that. And the learning thing I think is overstated. I think we worry about that too much personally.

Adam Gifford

Agreed.

Andy Psarianos

Oh, "They're going to forget their sevens times table when they come back and they'll have," yeah, who cares?

Adam Gifford

Sorry, that face I just pulled in and maybe I shouldn't do, but no, the face that I just pulled was kind of like, yeah, and that's really not a big issue. It's okay.

Andy Psarianos

It's not a big issue at all. You know what I mean? A lot of people make a big issue out of it though, right? It's like,

Robin Potter

But what about, okay, so looking at the UK, you're saying five weeks?

Adam Gifford

Yeah, around that.

Robin Potter

Versus more like eight weeks, maybe nine, which is ideal. I mean it's still a big chunk of time.

Adam Gifford

Well, I can throw another country in the mix, which is New Zealand and the way that it works. So New Zealand will have slightly less again, because we have four terms, so it tends to be a bit more evenly broken up. And I remember when I first came over to the UK, it took a bit of getting used to because the first term out here in the UK is very long. And so I was always used to think to myself the first one's very long, second one's very short. And I thought it takes a while to just to get back into the whole regularity and consistency of schooling. And I think when I first got here, I preferred that model of the four terms. I think we had possibly two weeks between each term in New Zealand and then say four weeks in summer. So shorter, slightly shorter than the UK and then definitely shorter than Canada.

And I quite like the regularity of that as a classroom teacher. But I guess that Canadian model, if you like, where it's a really big chunk of time. I suppose what it does do is that it fully gets you away from school though. So, you have a totally different head-on and no, I think that to me has the potential to be quite exciting. Maybe as a parent, if I put my parent hat on, it might one of those that you go, oh, flip neck, this is a long one, when's school coming back, man? But it really allows you to separate out being at school and being on holiday. I just think the biggest thing for me, yeah, the biggest thing for me is it's simply that you're still learning. It's not like things stop. You are learning and the skills that you're learning and what you're doing is just simply different.

And they can be at least every bit as rich and at times richer. And even though I think that that might sound like, oh, the wrong thing to say or something like that, it's just simply true because you think about those number of people that have learned and done things and worked out what they didn't like and worked out what they like. I think you need that space to be able to do that without thinking, oh, I've got to do this piece of homework or do this bit of this or do whatever. All those other trappings that come with that, the regular school year, I think it gives us a chance.

Robin Potter

So if left up to us,

Andy Psarianos

If it were up to me, I would say no for sure. Just leave it the way it is. And maybe I think there's an argument for making it even longer, but that's probably not a lot of people would agree with me on that one. I don't think you need 190 days of school a year. I don't think you do. I think kids get so fed up.

Robin Potter

That sounds like another topic we're about to get into-

Andy Psarianos

I think you need more white space in people's lives. I think work is the same too. I think that that's the way things need to go. I don't know that people need to work nine to five, five days a week is kind of a thing of the past in my mind.

Robin Potter

Adam, are you listening to this?

Adam Gifford

Yeah, I am. I'm just-

Robin Potter

Taking notes-

Andy Psarianos

I believe that. I believe that because I think-

Robin Potter

We've recorded-

Andy Psarianos

It's recorded. I think, look, when I think about any kind of breakthrough in my life, whatever that is, I'm talking about work stuff. It's always happened when I'm not working.

Robin Potter

Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

When I'm not officially working because I go, I'm whatever, doing whatever it is that my day job is supposed to be. It's not a creative time for me, but when I'm reflecting and I'm sitting, and it could be something as stupid as sitting on a-

Robin Potter

A beach-

Andy Psarianos

A beach, but it could also just be doing chores at home. But they're not work chores, right? It's like I'm cooking, or I'm putting out the trash or something. I have these boom, these aha moments or driving or whatever. And sometimes, and I think people need that space and I think kids need that space, maybe more than adults do.

Adam Gifford

I agree. And this isn't one for now. This has the potential to be its own episode. And I think maybe we've talked about it a while ago, but I was never brave enough as a headteacher because the far too much kickback when I started to broach the subject, I'd get rid of homework. I think my homework,

Andy Psarianos

I agree.

Adam Gifford

Get rid of it. And then you finish school and you know what I mean? Do some reading, read something, that'll be good. I have no problem with that. But anyway, that's-

Andy Psarianos

Okay. So another episode, we're going to talk about that and we're going to talk about summer school.

Robin Potter

Okay.

Andy Psarianos

Because that's another one. And then for me that's the same thing. Look guys like always solving world problems. This is the place, right? Just come here.

Robin Potter

Once again.

Andy Psarianos

Thank you for joining us on the School to School Podcast.