THE adults walking out of the primary school in the Welsh town of Barry look visibly relieved. They have just dropped their children off at a summer programme, which provides meals and activities for the day. Mere days into the six-week summer holidays, these parents say they are already struggling to keep their children entertained, and wish the break were shorter. Many experts would agree, arguing that the long break harms children. Why is it that they believe the summer holidays are too long, and what should be done instead?

The vast majority of the world’s school calendars have long summer holidays, their length ranging from three weeks in South Korea to three months in America, Italy and Turkey. The holidays’ 19th-century origins are hazy. They are popularly believed to be a hangover from the West’s agrarian past, when families needed their children’s help in the fields during the summer, though many historians think the evidence for this is thin. In the popular imagination, school summer holidays conjure up a picture of carefree youthful exploration. But for many children and their families, the reality is very different.

Research, mostly from America, suggests that children will return from the long break having forgotten much of what they were taught the previous year. One study from an unnamed state in the American South found that this “summer learning loss” could equate to a quarter of the year’s education. Poor children tend to be the worst affected: a study done in 2007 in Baltimore found that variations in summer loss might account for two-thirds of the achievement gap between rich and poor children by the age of 14 or 15. Evidence from outside America is more scarce. But studies have found that children also regress over the summer break in Belgium, Britain, Canada, Germany and Malawi, all of which have much shorter holidays than America. For parents too, summer holidays can be challenging. Many rely on the term-time services that schools give their offspring, such as supervision and meals. Come the holidays, they can suddenly find their schedules and budgets stretched.

Experts suggest three types of solutions to the problems posed by the long summer holidays: extending school years; spreading holidays to other times of the year; and more state-provided summer-holiday activities. Advocates for the first approach point enviously to South Korea, which has the world’s longest school year and shortest summer break. South Korean students score brilliantly on comparative measures such as the OECD’s PISA test of maths, science and reading skills. But there is a cost: they also have a higher incidence of mental-health problems than children in other rich countries. Others propose spreading holidays more evenly through the school year. But some experts say there is little public support for restructuring the school calendar, which is often deeply ingrained in tradition, and that the evidence (albeit limited) on year-round schooling remains inconclusive. A third solution is to increase funding for summer activities. This may allow children to develop skills not emphasised in the school curriculum. “We need more learning [over the summer], but not necessarily more schooling,” says Matthew Boulay of the National Summer Learning Association, an American NGO.