Split school holidays again
I sometimes wonder if the is anyone at EG who has any common sense. The autumn half term in 2023 generally starts on Monday 30 October 2023. So, once again, like they did with the spring bank holiday week this year, you can only book a part week. I now have to wait until the beginning of November 2022 to get the rest of my week booked.
Surely when it comes to school holidays, a more common sense approach to when you can book to should prevail.
Comments
-
Notwithstanding any justified complaints about the club's recent operations half terms in England never (usually and I can't remember any) go into November, they will probably be the week of Monday 23rd.
I've checked Nottinghamshire mbee and they are the 23rd October 2023. Unless your school or authority will have different dates?
https://www.nottinghamcity.gov.uk/media/3082397/2023-2024-school-term-dates.pdf
I've also done a quick check through five other areas and it's all been the 23rd October so far. To be a little fair to the club it can't know all the differing half term dates for the whole country?
Post edit: I've just found out Sunderland and Newcastle have different dates!!! One is 23rd, the other the 30th, so I would check with your school direct. Of course academies can set their own dates irrespective of LEA dates as well.
Post edit 2 , it looks as though some places are having a two week half term? Do teachers do any work?
0 -
Nottinghamshire half term dates do most certainly go into November in 2023. It wouldn’t be that difficult for the club to check, they are published online. They only have to go into the government website and put a few post codes in. Perhaps if they don’t check they won’t put the price up in the first week of November.😀
0 -
Well it caught me out and I'm a Ofsted inspector
It's not as easy as the club doing that Steve as what is published online are LEA dates which do not apply to any academy which can set their own dates, and 80% of secondary school are academies and 64% of primary schools are part of a larger secondary academy trust so will follow them as well.
Also Nottingham also has a two week half term because they close so late for Christmas and in the summer so their first week is actually the 23rd.
What I've looked at since posting using government data is that the large majority of LEAs are 23rd October.
In any case those dates won't be confirmed (legally) yet till they are approved by Governors sometime this term.
So taking all that into account I still say asking the club to check all 152 LEA's then check further with all academies is asking a bit too much. Of course perhaps they did as as the majority are 23rd the club went with that?
0 -
Of course Governors approval will just be a formality. Certainly here in Nottinghamshire there was a debate a few years ago about Academies choosing their own holidays, when a number of secondaries chose different dates to their feeder primaries. Needless to say, parents created such a fuss (and rightly so) that it didn’t happen again.
There is also a consultation in the county at the moment to fix Easter back to the “traditional” Easter break being the week before and the week after the Easter weekend.
I’m not saying the powers that be should check all LA dates but where it spans more than one date, common sense should prevail.
0 -
They do indeed mbee. Perhaps you haven't been posting on here long enough to know I'm a retired teacher/DH who for years had to put up with teacher bashing over the years on here so my post was a tongue in cheek btw.
Was the two week half term always the case?
0 -
As the CAMC club do, at the latest check, incorporate other countries apart from England I would have thought trying to satisfy everyones needs a tad difficult.
Of course the accounting moles at EG will make sure that every possible week/s either side of the perceived majority start date (23/10) will be highly priced and just to make sure they take Scottish and Welsh dates into account may just decide to take October and November as half term knowing them.
2 -
When I was a chair of Governors it certainly wasn't a formality and special care was taken over the dates to ensure no problems like you describe but also at the same time to balance the educational needs of pupils around a late or early Easter.
Fixing Easter as you suggest can cause problems with a late or early Easter. Terms need to be balanced for all sorts of reasons, some educational some not, and a late Easter especially causes problems with good preparation for any exams. One year we were back for only three weeks before exams started.
Hope you get sorted out.
0 -
Just quoting myself but quite a few LEA's are thinking of another option where the 'Easter holidays' will be fixed every year in terms of dates, for example first two whole weeks in April, and if Easter itself falls outside of of those dates they will given as BH days off on the Friday and Monday. This actually happened some year ago and it worked very well.
0 -
The autumn half term has been two weeks for about the last five years. We get one week less in the summer. What we find, however, is that many schools tag one or two Inset days to either the beginning or end of the summer holiday to compensate. We had a countywide consultation and it seems to work well.
I do believe, however, that school holidays should generally be standardised. Although in Nottinghamshire, being right on the border with Derbyshire where, perhaps, staff teach in one Authority and their children go to school in another, problems can arise although, of late, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire school holidays seem to be standardised. I'm sure, however, similar problems arise over in the east on the Lincolnshire border and north to South Yorkshire. Leicestershire do their own thing and the summer break seems to start much earlier than anywhere there.
With regard to teacher bashing, I subscribe to the digital version of The Times with some really nasty comments on there about teachers and their hours and holidays. They got short shrift from me.
1 -
mbee1 said:
Leicestershire do their own thing and the summer break seems to start much earlier than anywhere there [else??].
I'm not a teacher, or a governor or an Ofsted inspector or anything connected with schools. However, I was at school in Leicester. I well recall things changing; I am not sure of the exact date, but, I think, sometime around the early to mid-sixties. Our holidays were always in line with other places in England, breaking up for summer around the end of the third week of July and returning on a Tuesday in early September - I believe the second Tuesday, but can't be sure. My birthday is on 4 September, and, as a young boy, I was usually on holiday on my birthday.
Then there was a decree, no idea who by, that Leicester should have a holiday fortnight designated to be the first two weeks of July. All local manufacturing businesses closed down. Inevitably the schools had to close too and so it was that Leicester's holiday started earlier than everywhere else and our summer holiday was extended to eight weeks. Later, again no idea when, the end of the holidays moved back to around a day or two after the August bank holiday, so it became six weeks, or thereabouts, once again. I am a little vague on the precise details, but that is broadly what happened.
The concept of a holiday fortnight has since frayed at the edges; not many companies now stick rigidly to this and school holiday dates have become less precisely defined as well, but they still break-up earlier than most regions.
I don't really have an interest, except to try to avoid sites during school holidays, but it always irritated me that our holidays were out of line with the rest of the country. Especially later when I moved to Hampshire and found my friends and relatives in Leicester having different holidays. Now the whole thing is a mess with dates all over the place - one of many consequences of the commodification of schools and colleges.
2 -
If all schools and all work places in all areas had identical holiday dates that would simply put intolerable pressure on transport, travel, and holiday bookings at resorts as well as at caravan sites. Luckily holiday dates are sensibly staggered.
0 -
But not staggered for those reasons. Luckily is the right word.
0 -
They’re not that staggered either. The autumn half term is the one most likely to be staggered but only by one week. Christmas, Easter and summer are nearly always identical apart from an odd day, except summer in Scotland which is earlier.
0
