by Holly Golightly

Created on: May 18, 2008   Last Updated: August 10, 2008

Yes I truly believe it should be.

I have a friend up in Manchester who works in a school and I know how many holidays she has, even though she is not a teacher, but as part of the school, she gets holiday which totals around nearly 12 weeks a year.

With the average school day starting at 9.00 and finishing at 3.00, with often 45 minutes for lunch and 20 minutes in the morning and afternoon for a play time session. This taken away from the actual school working day itself leaves just over 4 hours for lessons.

In France a school day starts at 8.00am and often ends at 6.00pm and in Japan I believe this is the same.

In England a lot of schools are under achieving because I truly believe we cram too much into a short school day and thus the poor kids are under so much pressure to do homework.

Most parents I am sure would appreciate a longer school day, as having worked where some mothers have had to leave work early because their child needed to be picked up from school, which often meant them leaving work at around 2.00pm every day to get to the school by 3.00pm and despite this employee being a full time member of staff their hours were shortened by this regular occurrence of having to collect their child from school (another topic for Helium maybe).

I know that some schools have a "school club" which operates after school whereby it gives the kids extra time to play with their friends or to do extra curricular subjects such as drama, music or other academic subjects to help them brush up. This also helps with the fact that most parents go to work full time and are unable to leave work to collect their kids and there is no one at home to care for them, so the parents believe that their children are more secure at school until such time they can collect them.

Teachers often complain that they work long hours and whilst I sympathize with their plight, there are an awful lot of people who work long hours and though they might not necessarily work with children, they don't get the added benefit of lots of holidays, and again I know that some teachers like to brush up on their skills, again this is very admirable, but people in other jobs also brush up on their skills and this is usually done in their own time or sometimes in the company that they work for, they don't have 6 weeks during the summer to do it in.

All jobs come with their rewards and I have worked with kids ranging from 4 to 16. The kids can be very demanding, sometimes at the end of a session, you feel totally drained, but as with any job, their are penalties as well, and with teaching their are books to be marked, lessons to be planned.

Whilst I appreciate that "some" teachers attend Summer camps, a lot take the opportunity to just simply have a holiday. For those teachers who do attend summer camps, there are an awful lot of teachers, who could probably step into the jobs "temporarily" while those teachers who want to attend summer camps do so. Then again, if the school working day was extended, I think the need for school camps may also be reduced too!

I remember my poor parents also dreading the summer holidays and wondering how they were going to manage my brother and I, as both parents were working full time and while they could call upon an odd neighbor or friend occasionally to look after us, it proved a complete nightmare for my parents when they could not find anyone and my mum often had to take holiday (which at that time was no where near as good as the holiday entitlement is nowadays).

Restructuring a school timetable seriously needs to be considered and I don't see any harm in lengthening the school year at all. I can only see a lot of benefits.

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