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If there is a beat that marches us through life, it can be argued that it is the educational calendar that is conducting the drummers. The relentless rhythm of terms and holidays finds its way into every facet of life: from when we go on holiday and how much we pay, all the way to how busy the roads are at certain times and what the shops are trying to sell you and when.

So, it is not surprising that every year people campaign to change the school timetable: some aiming to ensure more affordable holidays away, some because they are concerned about the learning gaps that can emerge over a six-week summer break, some because they want teenagers to start later, and some just because they resent the impact that school has on normal adult life.

Yet, every year, the outcome is the same: nothing changes. The annual school structure is just so embedded that changing it, some claim, is impossible.

But are the political and practical obstacles to radical timetable reform insurmountable?

First, let us address a myth. The common perception is that our extended summer break is a hangover of an agrarian economy where the children were needed to work the fields during harvest.

However, Laura Harrison, senior lecturer and modern history programme leader at the University of the West of England, disputes this narrative.

“Of course, in some rural areas it was certainly useful if children were off school to help with the harvest, but that certainly does not explain the origins of the summer holiday,” she says. “The summer break is something that we see in the calendar of private schools and grammar schools - so not traditionally places where children would need to be pulled out of school to work in the fields or in factories.”

So, where did the view that an extended summer break was necessary come from?

“In industrial districts, school holidays were often more closely related to the local mill or factory holidays - not because children needed to work, but to align school holidays with the time that parents were likely to be off work,” Harrison says. “It was often deemed advisable for schools to fall in line with important local employers and big works to prevent truancy.”

Whatever the reason for its origins, the summer break - and, indeed, the less lengthy breaks throughout the rest of the year - has long been cited as an issue, be that by industry, politicians or parents.

For the latter group, much of their ire is directed at the cost of holidays outside of term time, which can be up to 120 per cent higher than for equivalent breaks during the school term. Since parents started getting fined for taking children out of school for a holiday, that anger has only grown.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg, according to the research. Another key gripe among parents - and among industry - is childcare. While schools should not be viewed as a babysitting service, that is one function they have, as has been made clear during the coronavirus lockdown. And many of the calls to change the long summer break, in particular, are based on the cost of childcare.

The costs are significant. There were around 8 million families with dependent children in the UK in 2019, according to the Office for National Statistics, with 6.2 million of these defined as “couple families” - where carers were married or cohabiting. In more than seven in 10 (73 per cent) of these couple families, both parents were in employment.

This means that, when the holidays roll around, industry faces a huge demand for time off and, if that is not granted (and it cannot be granted for everyone, or even most people), parents then face a huge childcare cost. How much of a financial burden can that be? According to the 2019 Holiday Childcare Survey, published by the Coram Family and Childcare charity, working parents in England would have to find £828 on average for six weeks of holiday childcare per child. In Scotland, the figure was £739, and in Wales it was £778.

Meanwhile, the average price of an after-school club in the UK is just over £60 a week, which adds up to £2,400 a year during term time. This means that a place in an after-school club costs parents about as much as the average household spends on food and drink each week.

“There is no doubt that the length of the typical school day and the duration of school holidays cause significant problems for many working families,” says Katie Bailey, professor of work and employment at King’s College London’s business school. “Jobs that can be adapted to term-time working during school hours are extremely rare, and so parents typically have to rely on friends or family or paid childcare of one kind or another to help them cope with school pick-ups and drop-offs, and with caring for children after school or during holidays.”

It’s not just financial but also safeguarding and pastoral issues that can be exacerbated when children are out of school for long periods - and there is a huge wealth of research around the academic consequences of an extended summer break.

All in all, people want the holidays spread out more, with a much shorter summer holiday and, in some cases, less total holiday altogether. With all these issues in mind, it may seem odd that everyone has not got together to change things. So, what’s stopping them?

Well, on many of those points, there is an important question as to whether it is schools that should do the changing. For example, is it actually incumbent on employers to ensure that they are catering to the diverse needs of their own staff?

“All employees have the right to request flexible working after 26 weeks of employment,” states Bailey.

In theory, parents should be able to adapt work to fit the school schedule. Companies could plan for large numbers of staff to be working flexibly during the terms and be absent or on flexitime during the holidays, working evenings and weekends.

In practice, the obstacles to such a shift are enormous, not just financially but logistically. And the world of work and the rules of supply and demand just would not facilitate such a shift, not least because school holidays create an uptick in demand for products and services. The maths doesn’t add up.

That said, the past few months have brought huge shifts in the flexibility of employers on at least a day-to-day basis, if not around extended periods of leave. Before this crisis, flexible working was for the few, not the many. Research suggests that 80 per cent of the UK workforce still went into the office every day, while a TUC survey last year found that flexitime was unavailable to more than half (58 per cent) of the UK workforce. The proportion rose to nearly two-thirds (64 per cent) for people in “working-class” occupations.

What about the situation now? Flexitime has been the norm for most working families. But we shall see to what extent we return to the old ways - it is unlikely that any new reality will be anywhere near what would be required to adapt to the school year, though.

So, if the world really can’t shift to adapt to the educational calendar, is it any easier to get education to shift to a calendar more aligned with the world?

This is just as complicated. Any changes to the working timetable of teachers would be hugely complex to initiate, predominantly because school staff are already working harder than they should be - even with the number of holidays they have. And their total number of holiday days is already at the lower end of the global spectrum for schools.

The TUC found that teachers collectively do 9 million hours of overtime per week and pretty much any survey or data collection around teachers will tell you the same thing: they are stressed, overworked and - for the amount they do - underpaid.

Despite being among the most overworked in Europe, teachers in England also have the shortest summer holidays: among the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries, only the Netherlands, Liechtenstein and parts of Germany have such a short break, while Albania, Italy, Latvia and Portugal can take between 12 and 13 weeks off. Primary schools in Bulgaria, meanwhile, shut their doors for 15 weeks in the summer. “In terms of structure, the UK is very comparable to other OECD countries,” confirms Asma Benhenda, research fellow at University College London’s Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities. But she adds that the UK is also among the countries with the lowest number of total holiday weeks each year, at an average of 12 to 13. This figure is comparable with Germany (12 weeks), but much less than France (16) and Sweden (15).

In short, if you want to change the school year, you have a lot to sort out around teacher pay and conditions first.

“While there may be value in policymakers exploring the potential benefits of restructuring the school year or school day, it is clear that there would be multiple barriers that would need to be overcome,” says Natalie Perera, executive director of the Education Policy Institute. “Any significant reforms would raise huge questions about teacher pay and workload demands.”

She adds that, while academies already have the freedom to set their own term dates and the length of the school day, “in practice, most tend to follow traditional term dates and hours”. “Essentially, any legislation that compelled schools to observe certain hours would carry implications for school autonomy, funding and the supply and deployment of teachers,” explains Perera.

Benhenda agrees. “Teachers in England work far longer hours than their international counterparts, and they already feel overwhelmed by their workload - so any increase in instruction time should take into account its potential adverse effect on teachers’ health and, as a consequence, on teaching quality,” she says.

If the benefits of a shift were large enough, such an upheaval could still be worth it. Unfortunately, though, there is no evidence that the same issues around the cost of holidays, problems with childcare or work patterns would be solved - they would just be more spread out. And the academic boost? What little evidence there is suggests there may not be a benefit there either.

“In the early 2000s, several counties in North Carolina switched to year-round calendars, spreading the 180 instructional days evenly across the school year,” reveals Benhenda. “Results suggested that year-round schooling has essentially no impact on the academic achievement of the average student.”

Meanwhile, in 2014, the School Teachers’ Review Body published a report recommending that working days and hours for teachers remained as they were, and research from the Education Endowment Foundation on extending school time concluded that doing so would bring “low impact for moderate cost, based on moderate evidence”.

In political terms, there is no smoking gun to persuade politicians to change anything - but a lot of guaranteed problems if they do.

But even if someone could get teachers, politicians and industry to agree to change things, it is still unlikely we would be able to. Why? The need for consensus.

“It is difficult to see how unanimity could be reached about a new structure on a national scale because there would likely be a large number of competing views and arguments,” says Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders.

He explains that even subtle shifts in term dates between regions “are always difficult”, because it “tends to create a situation where regions are out of sync with neighbouring areas, which causes problems for members of staff whose children go to schools across the border”.

Politicians, teachers and industry would want very different things out of any change, and none of those aims would likely align with parents’ priorities.

So, in the end, are we destined to just keep it as it is? Barton believes that, although we get calls for change every year, we are actually all too wedded to the system to really want to change it - despite the numerous problems that it can bring. “There are undoubtedly arguments in favour of various models, but the difficulty in implementing them is that the existing structure of the school year is so entrenched,” he says.

Better the devil you know, perhaps?

Chris Parr is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 29 May 2020 issue under the headline “Why not tear up the structure of the school year?”