Schools in Ireland enjoy some of the longest summer holidays in Europe and elsewhere. The three-month break for secondary school students – and the two-month shutdown of primary schools, beginning this week – is a hangover from a time when agriculture was the dominant economic activity and children were needed to help work family farms.
Agriculture now accounts for little more than 1 per cent of the Irish economy and the use of child labour is tightly regulated. Thus it is reasonable at this point to postulate that long school holidays are an anachronism out of step with the needs of modern Irish society.
Much of the increase in productivity that underpinned economic progress in recent decades is linked to an increase in the number of women in the workforce. Female participation – at 61.4 per cent – is now at its highest since records began in 1998.
Despite a marginal shift towards a more even distribution of parental responsibilities over the period, women remain the primary caregivers in the majority of domestic arrangements and the bulk of the responsibility for caring for children during the school holidays falls to them.
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It is not hard to make the argument that the current regime limits economic growth and that shorter school holidays could further enhance female participation and bolster productivity.
The counter-argument is that if a system is not broken then it does not need fixing. Irish school students consistently score above the average in EU and OECD surveys of academic achievement.
This is of course only one measure of the effectiveness of the current system. It does not follow that spreading teaching hours – which are amongst the highest in the OECD – over a longer period would be detrimental. Likewise, it is wrong to assume that teachers are opposed to shorter days and longer school years.
In truth the debate about school holidays is not an economic or pedagogical one. It is about the growing disconnect between the way the school year is structured and how we live our lives.
