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The two-week half-term dilemma
More schools are offering a longer break, forcing parents to take unpaid leave or pay for more childcare
“It is one of the great dividing lines between schools,” said Lottie Hayton in The Sunday Times: “is your October half-term holiday one week or two?” Private school pupils typically get a fortnight off; state schools are increasingly offering the same, or considering doing so. But the policy is “not without critics”.
This year, for the first time, Surrey County Council has introduced the fortnight off for the 70 schools in its area. “It will also be the last time.” Schools fed back that they wanted to revert to a one-week break, which teachers said was “better for children’s learning and attendance”.
‘Rest and reset’
About 15% of state school teachers in England say their school now offers a two-week October break, said Lauren Crosby Medlicott in The i Paper. That’s up from 12% in 2025 and 7% in 2023. The “rationale” is that it gives pupils and staff “more time to rest and recharge”. The longer break can also offer families “greater flexibility and the chance for a cheaper holiday”, after the main tourist season has ended. And for neurodivergent households, the longer break can offer the chance to “recover from the demands of school”. Teachers, too, would “bite your hand off” for that extra week, said primary school teacher Lee Parkinson.
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A longer break is “critical to keeping concentration and energy levels up” among staff and pupils alike, said David Hatchett, CEO of the Anthem Schools Trust, which has introduced the longer half-term across its 15 schools. “When you have had such a long holiday over the summer and then you return to a long and intensive first half term, it is quite a big adjustment for a teacher and school leader,” he told the Press Association. One week is “arguably too late and short for a proper rest and reset”.
‘Stretched’ parents
As a parent of a school-age child, “no thank you”, said Natasha Hinde in HuffPost. Of course it’s important for children to rest, but what about the needs of working parents? Plenty of them are “drowning right now”, and “already stretched to breaking point”.
Most won’t have the luxury of taking unpaid leave to spend with their kids, to “swan about together” on holidays and “fun days out”. After six weeks of their summer holidays “we’re pretty much out of annual leave”, but we then have two more weeks of childcare to sort, “which ends up easily costing hundreds of pounds – potentially triple that if your child is disabled”.
And what about the parents whose children attend different schools or even nurseries, and those two weeks occur at different times? Ultimately, the thing “everyone wants is consistency”, Parkinson told The i Paper. “If an area is going to do it, everyone should.”
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Harriet Marsden is a senior staff writer and podcast panellist for The Week, covering world news and writing the weekly Global Digest newsletter. Before joining the site in 2023, she was a freelance journalist for seven years, working for The Guardian, The Times and The Independent among others, and regularly appearing on radio shows. In 2021, she was awarded the “journalist-at-large” fellowship by the Local Trust charity, and spent a year travelling independently to some of England’s most deprived areas to write about community activism. She has a master’s in international journalism from City University, and has also worked in Bolivia, Colombia and Spain.
