School summer holidays are an increasingly topical issue. For hardworking local families, two challenges present themselves during the school holidays. Firstly how best to keep their children occupied and secondly the increasingly high cost of a family holiday away. Both of these, I have spoken on repeatedly in Parliament.
Keeping children entertained throughout the school holidays is no mean feat, especially where both parents are at work and the no near family on-hand to step into the breach. There are a variety of holiday camps / clubs catering for a seemingly endless appetite for sport, drama, culture or adventure. These though can often be expensive, especially spread over the entire summer holiday. I have pressed for the greater use of school facilities for these camps / clubs. We should be opening up school facilities for free for voluntary groups, or at cost for commercial groups. If people are willing to come together to provide constructive activities for young people, why should we be charging them for the privilege?
I am regularly contacted by parents who are unhappy about the higher cost of holidays during school holidays. We also now have stricter rules around children being allowed to miss school during term-time. The rules that govern absenteeism have to strike a balance between making sure children do not miss out on the opportunity of education, but some parents argue that too often these rules are too strictly enforced. This can prevent parents from taking their children on holiday during off-peak times, where prices are cheaper.
The crux of the problem is the cost of holiday's rocket during the school holidays. Most schools having their summer holidays at roughly the same time, concentrating peak demand on a narrow six week window. To cut prices, we should be spreading these peak periods.
In countries like Germany, they have the start and ending dates differently in each region, spreading out demand, so not all children are off at the same time. So for example whilst we would keep 6 week summer holidays, some schools would start two weeks earlier, and some would finish two weeks later. This would spread the peak demand over 10 weeks rather than 6 weeks, helping bring down the price.
The Government supports this idea and now has given individual schools the ability to set their own term dates, though I haven't seen many take advantage. Therefore I think we need to go further and I will keep pushing the Government to actually co-ordinate this flexibility by region, rather than just leave it to each school. It will help parents, schools and the tourism industry where demand outstrips supply in the current six week window – a clear triple win.
