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A Break From Reality – Why Holiday-Related ‘Learning Loss’ Is Claptrap

If individual schools and LAs reschedule their holidays it will lead to disaster, says Kevin Harcombe – reworking the six-week summer might not be a bad idea, but let᾿s keep learning loss out of it…

Kevin Harcombe
by Kevin Harcombe
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PrimaryEnglish

Barnsley Local Authority has decided to shorten the school summer holidays by a whole week.

Learning loss is most pronounced during the lengthy summer break, but also occurs during the shorter holidays and, for some children in my school, during the lunch break.

Fat in head and stomach

Learning loss is claptrap. A swift Googling of the term brings up lots of promotional material for – surprise, surprise! – summer schools, who have created a gap in the market with their spurious research and are bloody well going to make a fast buck out of it.

According to these companies, after the long summer break children score lower in tests in than they did before, and the loss they suffer in knowledge is matched only by what they gain in weight, due to unsupervised eating patterns. Fat in both the head and stomach.

This is also true of teachers. It’s more likely that so-called ‘learning loss’ is simply the effect of changed routines. I myself return to school after the long break with no idea of my computer password or where to find the Post-it on which I wrote it down. The location of the keys to the confidential filing cabinet is an unknowable mystery to me, as is recalling the names of some of my staff.

A cool-headed, collective look

Even if learning loss did exist, the only fail-safe solution would be never to have a break at all. Which would no doubt suit the begrudgers and bile-frothing bastards who resent any form of happiness and pleasure in others’ lives, because they long-since have had none in their own, and seek to grind the rest of us into the same sour sad state as themselves.

They will say we no longer need long summer breaks at all, because children are no longer involved in harvests (more’s the pity, lazy so-and-sos). They will also accuse teachers of having too much time off, when they themselves only take three and a half days annual leave because they are in the private sector, not the cossetted public sector.

And besides, these people have no interests outside of work other than trolling websites, getting anxious when left to their own sad and empty devices and defensive when confronted by the hollowness of their miserable existence. Not all teachers are tribally opposed to a more even spread of holidays. Two-week half term breaks have quite an appeal for some, so perhaps a cool-headed and collective look at redistributing school breaks might be better than the Barnsley token tinkering.

Moreover, it is undoubtedly the case that the July to August break leaves some vulnerable families isolated for a long time. As many of those summer school ads gleefully point out, unsupervised children and teens are more likely to use alcohol, drugs and tobacco, engage in potentially criminal and other high-risk behaviours, and perhaps even drop out of school altogether.

This is also true of teachers.

Kevin Harcombe is a Teaching Award winner and headteacher at Redlands Primary School, Fareham

How this fits with the recent legal row about parents taking term-time holidays is anybody’s guess, but I hope Barnsley is prepared to deal with the court cases, as well as the undoubted increase in pupil absence. After all, LA holidays won’t necessarily tally with academies in the town…

Sacrosanct totem

Barnsley is tagging the week on to the October half-term, so it’s a redistribution rather than a removal, but it made news in all the national dailies because the long summer break is such a totem – sacrosanct to teachers and an object of seething fury to all those who only get four weeks leave a year. It’s certainly true that teachers, who work more unpaid overtime than most other professionals, are on their knees by the end of the summer term, with its report-writing, parents’ evenings, leavers’ celebrations, sports days and school productions. Children are pretty frazzled by July, and shortening the subsequent break would severely curtail their recovery time spent lying on the sofa with a bag of kettle chips, a bottle of pop and Jeremy Kyle on catch-up.

This is also true of teachers. The quasi-academic justification for the Barnsley change is ‘To help reduce learning loss’. Learning loss is a phenomenon said to occur over the long break, and manifests itself in children returning to school in September displaying behaviours (glassy eyes, blank facial expressions, generalised brain atrophy) that indicate they have never before been to a school, have no idea why they are in this building and have never actually learned anything before, ever, in their entire lives.

Learning loss is most pronounced during the lengthy summer break, but also occurs during the shorter holidays and, for some children in my school, during the lunch break.

Fat in head and stomach

Learning loss is claptrap. A swift Googling of the term brings up lots of promotional material for – surprise, surprise! – summer schools, who have created a gap in the market with their spurious research and are bloody well going to make a fast buck out of it.

According to these companies, after the long summer break children score lower in tests in than they did before, and the loss they suffer in knowledge is matched only by what they gain in weight, due to unsupervised eating patterns. Fat in both the head and stomach.

This is also true of teachers. It’s more likely that so-called ‘learning loss’ is simply the effect of changed routines. I myself return to school after the long break with no idea of my computer password or where to find the Post-it on which I wrote it down. The location of the keys to the confidential filing cabinet is an unknowable mystery to me, as is recalling the names of some of my staff.

A cool-headed, collective look

Even if learning loss did exist, the only fail-safe solution would be never to have a break at all. Which would no doubt suit the begrudgers and bile-frothing bastards who resent any form of happiness and pleasure in others’ lives, because they long-since have had none in their own, and seek to grind the rest of us into the same sour sad state as themselves.

They will say we no longer need long summer breaks at all, because children are no longer involved in harvests (more’s the pity, lazy so-and-sos). They will also accuse teachers of having too much time off, when they themselves only take three and a half days annual leave because they are in the private sector, not the cossetted public sector.

And besides, these people have no interests outside of work other than trolling websites, getting anxious when left to their own sad and empty devices and defensive when confronted by the hollowness of their miserable existence. Not all teachers are tribally opposed to a more even spread of holidays. Two-week half term breaks have quite an appeal for some, so perhaps a cool-headed and collective look at redistributing school breaks might be better than the Barnsley token tinkering.

Moreover, it is undoubtedly the case that the July to August break leaves some vulnerable families isolated for a long time. As many of those summer school ads gleefully point out, unsupervised children and teens are more likely to use alcohol, drugs and tobacco, engage in potentially criminal and other high-risk behaviours, and perhaps even drop out of school altogether.

This is also true of teachers.

Kevin Harcombe is a Teaching Award winner and headteacher at Redlands Primary School, Fareham

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