What's Half-term all About?

It all started the other evening, when I gave a lift to a friend.  Conversation soon turned to the plans she had for keeping the children amused this week when there's no school ... and even more so during the long summer break that's only a few short months away.  It's not until you - or someone you know - has to face this problem that you begin to realise just how important it is ... what a big impact it has upon otherwise 'normal' life.

School holidays, as we all know, began out of agricultural necessity combined with the observation of religious festivals.  Why the terms separated by them needed further splitting is somewhat obscure ... at least at my level of research!  I can only think that the poor teachers needed a breather, time to recover from the rigours of school life.  If that were so when our present education system was in its infancy in the late nineteenth century, how much more is it a necessity today, with all the additional demands placed on teachers for all kinds of record-keeping in addition to their core role of imparting knowledge and wisdom to the young.  I doubt many teachers actually stop work for a week at half-term.

Of course, it's not only home life that is disrupted.  There is a noticeable impact on road travel, as I know only too well from my own recent working life.  Journey times are significantly lower at holiday times especially in known congestion hot-spots.  While that's beneficial, another effect is much the opposite: the increase in the cost of leisure travel.  The airlines always raise their fares dramatically for these weeks, reverting to a lower level almost the day schools start again.  One has to question the fairness of this, especially since many schools, if not all, have introduced a penalty system to virtually ban children being taken out of school for family holidays during term time.

I wonder how much it would take to persuade the majority of parents on middle incomes, i.e. those who would consider a holiday requiring air travel, to abandon that sort of holiday altogether, thus turning the tables on the airlines and penalising them for trying to take advantage of a supposedly captive market!

It has long been an annoyance to me that so much of life that is not overtly linked to the academic world follows this outdated holiday system.  Many social groups and organisations, otherwise meeting on a weekly basis, will stop for a week at half-term, in addition to folding up completely in July and starting afresh in mid-September, the actual dates inevitably extended at both ends to allow for the differing holiday dates from one educational area to another.

I'm pleased that my greatest social activity, bell-ringing, doesn't observe this awful habit.  Since our practice night is Monday, bank holidays are a threat but, instead of having a rule about these, we take each one on its merits and, if enough ringers are willing to turn up, then we have a practice as normal.

It has been suggested that in the manner of the rest of the business world - the world of commerce that the pupils and students aspire to join upon completion of their education - schools should operate the year round, leaving holiday arrangements to be sorted on an individual basis subject to certain restrictions around examinations and so on.  Although consideration would need to be given to the need for teachers to have time for lesson planning and other 'background' tasks, there is much to be said for such a change.

However, like many a social 'battleship', I expect stopping it and turning it around could take another century and, until then, we shall have to live with this black-and-white distinction between academia and the real world.  I leave the last word on the subject to one of the favourite authors of my own childhood.  "Term time had gone as it if had been wiped out.  Real life was beginning again." - Arthur Ransome, Pigeon Post, chapter 2.