00:00School children always want more free time. It's a given. There is no doubt that this
00:06might be popular among some parents who clearly believe that school holidays are too long.
00:11Compare it against what happens in Europe. Now, of course, there's different modes of
00:14learning. There is an argument that the more school time you can get early on, the better,
00:20because that pays dividends. There's also very good chatter for, why not make the school
00:25days longer and incorporate a whole set of other things that go on, such as breakfast
00:30clubs and so on and so forth. The real difficulty is that schools are in a system that's been
00:36around for a very, very long time. Any sort of alteration is going to have a massive disruption
00:41for schoolteachers themselves. Of course, they've got other things on. And indeed, schoolteachers,
00:48they work immensely hard. It's been reported that of the 365 days in a year that pupils
00:53attend school, 490 of those. Ofsted Chief Inspector Sir Martin Oliver has suggested
00:59reconsidering school holidays to help vulnerable children. As a result, Oliver suggested that
01:03it's time to think about school holidays again. Some have suggested longer terms and shorter
01:08breaks. But quite clearly, when we've got a situation with young people leaving school
01:12who are sort of neither literate or numerate, and of course, we're sort of coming to an
01:17age where you have to do these things to sort of get the sort of decent jobs of the future,
01:21then there are big, big problems. Oliver also added that he's a real big believer in headteachers
01:26having the autonomy and the freedom to make the decisions that's right for them. Oliver
01:31said if a headteacher decides that they need to put that in place, then they should work
01:36with their community, work with the parents, and make sure that they can keep children
01:42safe the best way that they think. The parents of children, and you want to go away in holiday
01:46time, there is a sort of penalty of that. Condensing, you're absolutely right, would
01:50make the problems even more sort of profound in terms of the cost of going away.
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