Michael Gove wants to shorten the school holidays to four weeks, and / or keep schools open for 51 weeks of the year. The arguments for this move include that it's an attempt to curtail the drop in academic activity and standards that students experience over the summer holidays, and it's a way to support working parents by reducing the amount of time they are required to provide childcare.
It's also another way in which to make teachers suffer. School holidays are not holidays for teachers, they are used to plan for the term ahead and to catch up with marking and other paperwork. Seeing that teachers work during school weeks an average of 60 hours, many of them keep this high workload up simply because you are never more than 6 weeks away from a non-school week. Teachers then also use this time to rest off an abnormally high workload during school weeks.
For me, the only actual holiday I got was during the summer holidays, where my usual 2 weeks were spent catching up, planning for the future and in recovery, like at Easter and Christmas, then the rest of the holiday was my proper annual leave. This move effectively takes away teacher's annual leave.
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