Douglas Carswell's Blog

Each school to set its own term times

Ever wondered why schools close their gates for six or seven weeks each summer? It's a question I know many parents begin to ask themselves from around mid-July onwards.

Long summer breaks for schools stem from the days when a great many Britons lived in rural communities, and the harvest had to be gathered by hand. The kids, to put in bluntly, were needed in the fields.

Incidentally, in Scotland, with its cooler climate, the harvest tended to be gathered that much later. So schools went back a couple of weeks later. And still do.

If the agrarian calendar explains how things came to be, decades of bureaucratic inertia accounts for why they've stayed that way. With officialdom in charge of setting dates, there's been little incentive to change things or innovate.

Until now. The government has today published a Bill that would allow local schools to set their own term times. Good.

Bizarre, isn't it, that we still organise the timetable for our kids education around the needs of the nineteenth century agrarian calendar. Why not have shorter terms, but more of them? Or have a shorter summer break?  School on Saturdays, anyone? 

Or why not go even further? Don't just let schools decide when to open and close. Let them decide what to teach and how to teach it.  Every school should be free to opt out of the national curriculum as it chooses.

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