Should term times be made longer in schools in the country?

National World - LocalTV

Ofsted’s chief inspector has said that he’s keen to lengthen term times across the country in order to increase the amount of days children go to school. The leader of the head teachers' union has also suggested that ministers should consider shortening school holidays and letting teachers work from home.

Transcript

00:00School children always want more free time. It's a given. There is no doubt that this

00:06might be popular among some parents who clearly believe that school holidays are too long.

00:11Compare it against what happens in Europe. Now, of course, there's different modes of

00:14learning. There is an argument that the more school time you can get early on, the better,

00:20because that pays dividends. There's also very good chatter for, why not make the school

00:25days longer and incorporate a whole set of other things that go on, such as breakfast

00:30clubs and so on and so forth. The real difficulty is that schools are in a system that's been

00:36around for a very, very long time. Any sort of alteration is going to have a massive disruption

00:41for schoolteachers themselves. Of course, they've got other things on. And indeed, schoolteachers,

00:48they work immensely hard. It's been reported that of the 365 days in a year that pupils

00:53attend school, 490 of those. Ofsted Chief Inspector Sir Martin Oliver has suggested

00:59reconsidering school holidays to help vulnerable children. As a result, Oliver suggested that

01:03it's time to think about school holidays again. Some have suggested longer terms and shorter

01:08breaks. But quite clearly, when we've got a situation with young people leaving school

01:12who are sort of neither literate or numerate, and of course, we're sort of coming to an

01:17age where you have to do these things to sort of get the sort of decent jobs of the future,

01:21then there are big, big problems. Oliver also added that he's a real big believer in headteachers

01:26having the autonomy and the freedom to make the decisions that's right for them. Oliver

01:31said if a headteacher decides that they need to put that in place, then they should work

01:36with their community, work with the parents, and make sure that they can keep children

01:42safe the best way that they think. The parents of children, and you want to go away in holiday

01:46time, there is a sort of penalty of that. Condensing, you're absolutely right, would

01:50make the problems even more sort of profound in terms of the cost of going away.

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