Some schools are still open this week. There, that’s got that out of the way to begin with. 

It’s always a fraught business discussing anything about term dates at this time of year, because, as some of us start the heady process of unwinding from what has unquestionably been a challenging year, I know that others will still be battling their way through their final week.

It’s also the case that some schools have now already been closed for over a week, having completed their required 195 days some time ago.

For many of those still in school, the long, drawn-out summer term is likely to be followed by a somewhat shorter summer holiday, as authorities and academy trusts tackle the perceived problem of summer learning loss. 

Messing with the school summer holidays

We’ve seen it time and again, whether it was the craze at the turn of the millennium that led to schools adopting a five-term year (remember that? Is anyone still doing it, I wonder?) or the new trend for taking a week from the summer holidays and adding it to the October half-term.

The pages of this very publication have been scattered, over the years, with the proud announcements of significant changes, all designed to magically boost results - and relatively fewer examples of the schools and local authorities that then abandoned their plans.

Brighton and Hove council is one of the latest authorities to have abandoned the idea. It trialled a two-week October break in 2017 and 2018, only to find that 60 per cent of parents calling for it before the change became 60 per cent of parents wanting to scrap it after the trial. The intention was apparently to enable parents to take advantage of cheaper holiday prices: a nice idea for those jetting off to the Canaries, but not such a great deal if your saving is on a week’s caravanning in Whitby.

That change of heart didn’t stop Nottinghamshire, though, when it consulted on exactly the same arrangements with very similar results. It made the change for a four-year trial, but it wouldn’t be a great surprise to see it change back at the end of it all. 

The term-date lottery

The change is particularly challenging for those living in border regions, where a teacher now moving from Nottinghamshire to teach in Leicestershire will find themselves with a summer break of just four weeks. Meanwhile, those moving from Leicestershire to Derbyshire get seven. 

It’s issues like this that that make a change at individual school level all the more challenging. A longer break in October might be tempting for some families, but if families have children in different schools - or even in different authorities - then the term-date lottery simply narrows everyone’s choices.

It wouldn’t be so bad if it was clear that the changes solved a problem. We know, anecdotally, that everyone has concerns about summer learning loss. But the evidence that meddling with term dates helps is pretty thin on the ground. When these erratic changes occur, no one sets out to measure the impact on learning. And so, when they’re later abandoned, we’re none the wiser about what has actually been achieved.

And what little we do know about summer learning loss is often based on American research, where the typical summer holiday is around 10 to 12 weeks long - twice that normally seen in the UK, and therefore bound to have a greater impact on learning loss.

One of the solutions being rolled out in the US at the moment is a “balanced calendar year”, where the long summer holiday is reduced to about six weeks, with shorter breaks elsewhere in the year. What an inspired model! I say we should all adopt it here.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at East Preston Junior School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979