School summer holidays should be shorter

YOU return from work on a muggy August evening. Your unwashed teenage son is on the sofa playing Fortnite, as he has been doing for the past eight hours. Your daughter, scrolling through Instagram, acknowledges your presence with a surly grunt. Not for the first time, you ask yourself: why are school summer holidays so insufferably long?

This is a more serious question than it sounds (see article). Many children will return from the long break having forgotten much of what they were taught the previous year. One study from the American South found that this “summer learning loss” could be as high as a quarter of the year’s education. Poor children tend to be the worst affected, since rich ones typically live in homes full of books and are packed off to summer camp to learn robotics, Latin or the flute. A study from Baltimore found that variations in summer loss might possibly account for two-thirds of the achievement gap between rich and poor children by the age of 14-15. Long holidays definitely strain the budgets of poor families, since free school meals stop and extra child care kicks in.