The Secret Teacher: Do we really need a longer school year? Give me a break

“I’m sure the teachers won’t like this,” Andrea said. She was speaking as part of a radio discussion on the need for shorter school holidays and she was right. Scheduling this during the midterm break is downright insensitive – surely such topics should be limited to when teachers are in school and don’t actually have time to listen.

It made for very worrying content. On two separate occasions Shane, the presenter, pointed out that despite the number of days off, we spend longer hours in school than the EU average.

This fact fell on deaf ears both times, as it usually does. Andrea justified her impassioned arguments for an additional two to three weeks of tuition time by the need for digital literacy and consent programmes and so on.

When challenged on the need for children to have a break from school, she argued that the extra tuition time needn’t be academic as so many of our children can’t run or catch a ball. She clearly didn’t care much what we did with them as long as we kept them in school.

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Laura, a parenting expert, then spoke and also advocated the longer school year on the basis that the long holidays pose enormous difficulties for working parents. Most employers apparently only give 21 days annual leave, so to be fair there is a shortfall to make up. What holidays from parenting did those complaining expect, I wonder? That’s surely where the real problem lies – it’s important to fully consider the terms and conditions before taking on any job, including parenting.

Common errors

During my February midterm break I looked through 90 pieces of work for a recently completed CBA (classroom based assessment) and assigned provisional grades. I typed up the most common errors which featured in my Leaving Cert mock exams as this is always valuable feedback for the students. I wrote a long overdue email outlining my thoughts on what our priorities for school improvement should be – I’m assuming our principal will be grateful to have it even if it’s late, as many colleagues have said they simply can’t find the time to formulate their thoughts.

Most, understandably, won’t take the time during the holiday, and yet I know that they place enormous value on our collective efforts to continually improve what we do for the students in our care. While I embraced the freedom of getting out of school at the start of the midterm, I also recognised it as an opportunity to catch up on these important aspects of my work as a teacher. You could call it our homework, I suppose, and I have no issue with it. When I signed up for a teaching career I knew there would be lots of additional hours of work on top of the classroom contact time.

Shane argued a great case for letting children just be children and have their long holidays; but the only mention from the parenting expert of children’s needs coming first was that increased tuition time wouldn’t reduce our already-worrying rates of anxiety among young people. Eliminating homework might be a way of balancing things out.

According to the parenting expert homework is a bit of a pain, apparently just another inconvenience. It’s hard to “sandwich” it in around extracurricular, dinner and the parents’ long working day. The solution, of course, is increased tuition time “so they can do more of their learning in school”. So while as a teacher I’m trying to encourage my students to be independent learners, are parents so hands-on with the homework that it is making their own lives difficult? What are their children doing?

At this point I wondered when the focus would shift to what is best for children. (A mixed message on doing their homework certainly isn't). That's surely paramount in decisions regarding their schooling. My heart sank, therefore, when France's model of different zones having school holidays at different times emerged as the next point. Laura thinks such a model could help our economy here in Ireland too, and it would support tourism throughout the year!

If, as the parenting expert, she really represents anything like a majority of parents, one has to feel for a nation of schoolchildren who clearly aren’t welcomed home with open arms at the end of a school day. I very much doubt hers is a representative view. It just doesn’t ring true, especially when so many parents take their children out of school early to avail of a better price for the family holiday. That reality means that the teachers and students still continuing to work in school feel that the term drags unnecessarily – what on earth would an extended summer term be like?

Help on farm

Nonetheless, according to Laura we should extend it by two to three weeks because it’s been a very long time since the structure of the school calendar was dictated by the need for children to help parents on the farm. Has it occurred to her that from an educational perspective perhaps the calendar actually works?

The Department of Education could put the school year debate to bed with a well-worded statement on its merits. Perhaps it simply isn’t broken. And if it does need fixing, let the debate be in the right forum at the right time with the appropriate experts – and without arguments about boosting tourism and helping on the farm.

Andrea was right about teachers not liking it. We would prefer to put the students’ needs first.