The BBC reports:
Long school holidays should be abolished to prevent children falling behind in class, a report has said.
Oh yes, “a report” is one way to describe this.
The Institute for Public Policy Research said studies suggested pupils’ reading and maths abilities regressed because the summer break was too long…
…Report author Sonia Sodha said: “There have been many positive gains in education over the last decade, but in recent years results have plateaued…
Ms Sodha was on BBC “News 24″ TV just after 7 this morning, and I happened to see her interviewed. (You can now also see it on the BBC web page.) No offense is intended, but she herself looks like she has just recently left school. More importantly, her manner and argument level came across as that of a college student presenting an oral report.
It is wonderful she (thinks) she can do research, has her opinions and seems to have the best interests of children at heart. However, she’d best stay off TV for a few years: her bright-eyed attitude reminds one of the super-go-getter student who herself hated summer holidays. Listening to and watching her, one somehow can’t suppress the sense she was one of those who would rather have been doing more algebra, instead of enjoying some unstructured freedom to do anything from kicking around a football to cycling to going swimming to playing video games . . . without some adult standing over you, fingerwaggingly organizing “the fun”.
…She said there were two strong arguments for making a change.
“The first is that children regress with respect to their academic skills. Their reading and maths skills tend to decline when they’re away from school and this is particularly true for children from poorer backgrounds.
“And that actually brings us on to the second reason. Not all children have the same access to out of school activities during the summer holidays and kids from more advantaged backgrounds are the ones who are most likely to get to go to these activities.
“That’s reflected in statistics on anti-social behaviour and youth offending, and we know that those levels are higher during the summer holiday, particularly towards the end.”…
So because some young people are “poor”, and some misbehave because they have nothing to do with their free time in August, ALL children should be dragged prematurely into an adult timetable of year ’round, hum-drum, broken up with only short breaks, leaving them without that yearly marker pole to reflect a major shift forward in maturity of the sort even Ms Sodha had (recently) experienced?
Has Ms Sondra also investigated UK child stress, and what would be the impact of year-round testing and a non-stop educational hounding commencing from the (ludicrous) age of 4? Curious she chooses not to trumpet her research into how reducing summer break will address “educational professionals” having stupidly imposed that adult issue on often very young children.
…She said in countries such as Finland there was “more of an emphasis on well-being as the key to improving outcomes, with school counsellors and welfare teams for all schools”.
Is she serious? Is that a major argument in favor? First of all, how many countries in Europe (or anywhere, for that matter) are really like Finland?
It is surprising Ms Sodha remembers so little of her European cultural studies: after all, she’d probably just covered it in school. Finland is less “country” in the 60 million sense than a series of refreshing small-town communities, with one mid-sized city (Helsinki). All of Finland has only roughly 5/8ths the population of London.
Presumably, though, Ms Sodha has been to that beautiful, rugged country of courteous, pleasant people where raising your voice in public a bit almost feels as if you are overdoing things. If not, a good way to describe it (at least to an American) is Finland is sort of another version of thinly populated Alaska — but with almost no ethnic or religious minorities worth mentioning, no tremendous gradations in income, and a general cultural and linguistic uniformity otherwise almost unheard of in today’s western democracies. As the sister said when we visited, there are so many blondes, there’s nothing unusual about them in the slightest.
Secondly, if Ms Sodha hasn’t been, then it is not idle to think that perhaps a lack of research experience could undermine the “report”. For instance, at any time did she even so much as happen to have a stumbled upon the BBC web site? If not, that might have been because she was up late studying and at the time had simply missed this November 2004, 10 PMish, BBC piece:
…From the Finnish perspective, they wonder why English school children start so early - and say that by the age of seven, pupils are just about mature enough to begin learning…
…the long school holidays, including a 10-week break in the summer, is another part of their traditional school pattern that doesn’t seem to have been troubled by English anxieties over “learning loss” over the holidays…
Unless Finnish education has had a complete revamp since 2005, how Ms Sodha believes she can blame Britain’s summer holiday for educational shortcomings and simultaneously extol Finland’s when Finland has longer, unbroken summer school holidays, might seem to rather call her research into question. Bottom line: it doesn’t appear to be the 6 week British summer hols that make for the overriding problem in UK education.
Speaking of Finnish schools, during our visit the wife, the sister and myself (and there are quite a few degrees between us) were once standing outside of a school in Kuopio (I kid you not) and didn’t realize it was a school. At that moment, lacking a Finnish-English dictionary among us (don’t ask), what do you do? Well, you hope to find a Finn and hope he/she speaks a bit of English. If young, almost all do: as one Finn later told us, Finns don’t expect foreigners to speak their language. Finns, he joked, can speak it because they’ve been raised with it.
Oh, and what’s “school” in Finnish anyway? You’d never guess. Although, I suppose we would have known, had we been to school year ’round ourselves, right?
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–12:00, 18. Feb. 
