Niamh O’Reilly: How can a parent continue to work when their primary-aged children are out of school for two months of the year?
Ireland’s children enjoy almost two months off primary school and three months off secondary school during the summer.
But how can a parent continue to work when their primary-aged child/children, who need supervision, are out of school for two months of the year?
Even for my five-year-old, this is a simple mathematical equation to solve. The answer is to provide supports such as subsidised summer camps or structured summer programmes within school settings or even paid parental leave which must be taken during the summer holiday period.
READ MORE
The present solution offered to working parents in Ireland is lacking any real sense. We have a series of messy, just-muddle-through-and-get-on-with-it-style lifelines that are often expensive, unequal or unpredictable. Show me a working parent in Ireland during the summer break who has not had to call in every favour in the book and hope they have an understanding workplace to boot?
I can’t help feeling the powers that be have forgotten basic mathematics as they seem unable to solve this unbalanced equation for working families.
Taking annual leave will only get you so far. That’s assuming you haven’t used most of your leave for midterm breaks, Easter holidays, parent teacher meetings, school plays or random days off throughout the year. You could also take unpaid parental leave, but with many families already stretched financially this is not a solution.
Summer camps are the other go-to, even if the best ones need to be booked by February, cost a small fortune and don’t come within an ass’s roar of covering a full working day.
If you’re lucky, you might have secured a childminder to help or have grandparents or family to step in.
That’s a lot of “ifs” and it takes just one small “if” to be knocked out of place and the whole deck of cards will fall, generally on top of an exhausted mum.
Asked recently about consideration of any change to the length of school holidays, Minister for Education Helen McEntee said schools were “very active” throughout the year and they offered people a chance to “take a break”. It’s definitely a break for the children and teachers, just not so much for the working parents.
I’m not a total curmudgeon either. Children need a proper break to switch off and be children again. Teachers also put in a serious shift. School is full-on; between homework and after-school activities, most young children are scheduled to the hilt.
The summer break isn’t really the problem. Shortening it even by a couple of weeks would still leave a huge gap for parents. The elephant in the room is that, unlike my 1980s/1990s childhood when almost everyone, including me, had a stay-at-home parent, today that’s not the case. However, neither the length of the holidays nor level of parental support has been adjusted to reflect modern life.
Like most working parents, I dream of being able to take the whole summer off and enjoy it with my young children. At eight and five, they are in that blissful stage when their innocence and enthusiasm for life are at an all-time high. It’s like a wonder-drug. If I could bottle it and sell it then I’d probably have enough money to be able to make that summer dream a reality.
For now, I’d settle for even a few modest supports that don’t have me run ragged with guilt and exhaustion. What would also help is not to be told to stop complaining about how long the summer holidays are and just enjoy them while my children are still young. I’ll be sure to remember that the next time I’ve got a work deadline, no summer camps lined up and no village or magic pot of money to call on.
Niamh O’Reilly is a journalist and mother of two living in Wicklow
Simon Lewis: No. Children aren’t designed for non-stop schooling. They need breaks
Are school holidays too long? If you ask most parents then they’ll reply with an emphatic “yes” and if you ask most teachers then they’ll disagree. As a teacher, I know this argument won’t win me many fans, but it might give pause for thought about what we want schools to be.
Let’s start with some facts. In Irish primary schools, the summer break runs for about seven-and-a-half weeks. This summer, more than half of Irish schools are running summer provision. These are intensive, small-group programmes for children with additional needs or from disadvantaged backgrounds, staffed by teachers and SNAs.
Alongside that, most teachers spend two to three weeks on continuing professional development (CPD) during summer, but unless you’re living with a teacher then you’re unlikely to hear much about that.
However, this debate isn’t really about teachers. In my view, it’s about children and maybe a bit about childcare. Children aren’t designed for non-stop schooling. They need breaks. They need time to rest, play and sometimes get bored.
More school does not automatically mean better outcomes. Overloading their calendar may help parents in terms of childcare, but primary school isn’t about childcare.
Irish primary pupils spend a minimum of 910 hours a year in school, well above the average of 805 hours in countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
In terms of holidays, our summer sits squarely in the middle, with Germany and the UK on six weeks and Italy on 12 weeks. Our seven-and-a-half weeks doesn’t seem excessive. Virtually all countries still have a long summer break. It can’t be without merit.
The bigger issue here isn’t education. It’s childcare. More specifically, it’s the lack of structured, affordable wraparound care. In the absence of a proper government-funded national strategy, people understandably turn to schools to fill the gap.
For example, in the last year, I’ve been asked to talk about why schools should be responsible for everything from toxic masculinity to smartphone bans and everything in between.
Teaching is an intense profession. It’s six hours of live performance, decision-making, emotional labour and crowd management.
I often compare it to being a doctor, but instead of seeing your patients one at a time you have 25 of them in the room, all with different needs, and you’re expected to diagnose, treat and manage them simultaneously all day long.
If teaching really were the cushy number some imagine then why are we in the middle of a recruitment and retention crisis?
Schools are struggling to fill posts. Burnout is rampant. With so much time off and early finishes you’d think the issue would be too many applicants.
However, all that said, we could restructure the school year. We could have a shorter summer, with more frequent breaks during the year, and that’s a fair discussion.
However, if we do shorten the summer then who runs Summer Provision? If we cut CPD time, when do teachers upskill? These aren’t rhetorical questions, they’re trade-offs.
If we want schools to become year-round childcare hubs then we need to say so and fund them properly. If we want them to remain focused on education, we must stop treating holidays as a perk and start seeing them as part of a sustainable system not unlike the long summer break granted to those in other professions such as third-level lecturers, which rarely draws public outrage.
None of this is about teachers asking for sympathy. It’s about creating a sustainable, child-centred education system that serves the country well and about the Government providing a properly funded childcare system that meets the needs of working parents.
We can then let schools be schools and childcare be childcare.
Simon Lewis is principal of Carlow Educate Together primary school
