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.
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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.