THE summer holidays have just begun, but it is a busy morning at Cadoxton Primary School, in Barry, an industrial town in Wales. It runs a summer programme for hard-up children, providing meals and activities over the holidays. As youngsters run laughing and screaming into the school cafeteria for breakfast, their parents saunter out, some visibly relieved. Just three days into the six-week school holidays one beleaguered mother says her nine-year-old daughter has already asked five times to go bowling. Without the school’s help, she says, “it would be a long and expensive six weeks”.

In the popular imagination, school summer holidays conjure up a picture of carefree youthful exploration. But many parents 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. Researchers also say that the long break often sets back children’s learning, and that children from poorer backgrounds are disproportionately affected.

The vast majority of the world’s school calendars include summer holidays. Their length ranges from three weeks in South Korea to three months in America, Italy and Latvia. The holidays’ 19th-century origins are hazy. It is popularly believed that they are a hangover from the West’s agrarian past, when families needed their children’s help in the fields during the summer; but many historians think the evidence for this is thin.

Experts talk of “summer learning loss”, in which children return to school having forgotten some of what was taught the year before. “It is pretty clear that kids forget things over the summer,” says Harris Cooper of Duke University in North Carolina. A study, using test-score data from students aged seven to 15 in an unnamed state in America’s South in 2008-12, found that on average children lost more than a quarter of their school-year learning over the summer. Evidence from other countries is scarce. But studies have found that children regress over the summer even in Belgium, Britain, Canada, Germany and Malawi, all of which have much shorter summer breaks than America’s.

Losing it

The impact appears to vary by socioeconomic class. Many poor children fall behind their wealthier peers over the holidays. “Summer is the most unequal time of the year,” says Matthew Boulay of the National Summer Learning Association, an American NGO. Well-off parents can fill the gap left by school, keeping their children stimulated with summer camps, trips abroad or private tuition (see article). Poorer families, obviously, find this harder. Demand for subsidised “enrichment” activities often outstrips supply. Mr Boulay recalls meeting a mother in Oregon who queued for four hours to enroll for free swimming lessons for her son.

Holidays can be a financial strain, too. In countries where some children receive free school meals, summer means bigger grocery bills for hard-up families. Households where both parents work have to pay for extra child care, too. The Family and Childcare Trust, a charity, says that in Britain, where out-of-pocket child-care costs are the highest in the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, parents will spend an average of £133 ($172) per child, per week on child care this summer.

Natasha Cockram, who runs the summer programme at Cadoxton Primary School, worries that many children in Barry will spend most of the summer indoors, glued to their screens, because parents are both unable to afford child care or activities and also loth to let them roam unsupervised. “I get very bored at home,” complains one six-year-old taking part in the summer programme. “There’s nothing to do except sit on the sofa and watch TV.” Older children, too, may have less to keep them busy. Data from the Pew Research Centre suggest that the number of 16- to 19-year-olds in America with paid summer jobs has fallen from over a half in 2000 to roughly a third last year—though this is partly because more are taking on unpaid internships.

A study in 2007 in Baltimore, Maryland, claimed that summer learning loss could account for up to two-thirds of the “achievement gap” between rich and poor children by the age of 14-15. More recent American research, however, argues that early-childhood development might play a bigger role.

Benjamin Piper, of RTI International, an American research institute, suspects that the scale of summer learning loss may be worse in the developing world, where it has largely gone unnoticed and unstudied. In rural areas in particular, reading material can be hard to come by and some children still spend their holidays helping their families in the fields. A study Mr Piper co-authored in 2017, on Malawian children taking part in an American-funded literacy programme, may be the only one on summer learning loss in sub-Saharan Africa. It found that the loss was almost as big as the gains the literacy programme generated during the school year. Mr Piper says that international donors, who spent $1.4bn on basic education aid in Africa in 2015, risk “losing what they invested”.

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. South Korea is an extreme test-case for the first approach. It has the world’s longest school year and shortest summer break. For many students, even the short holidays offer little respite, since most are enrolled in private tuition, often in a hagwon (crammer). Three in ten parents surveyed last month said they planned to increase the number of hagwon classes their children will have to attend this summer.

Sure enough, 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 miserable time cramming for high-stakes exams, and higher incidence of mental-health problems than children in other rich countries.

Another objection to lengthening the school year is that it would strain public-education budgets. Teachers, who cherish their long breaks, would doubtless object unless they were paid more.

A second approach is to shorten the summer break but spread the holidays more evenly through the year. Janet Hayward, the head teacher at Cadoxton, wants the six-week British summer holiday reduced to four weeks, with half-term breaks lengthened. Professor Cooper says America’s three-month break may be outdated, and that a shorter one would be “more compatible with modern American life.”

But Mr Boulay doubts that campaigns to change the school calendar will have much effect. He says there is little public support anywhere for abolishing the summer break entirely. The holiday is deeply ingrained in tradition across the world, and (albeit limited) evidence on year-round schooling remains inconclusive about its effects on academic performance. Instead, Mr Boulay suggests that taxpayers or philanthropists should subsidise summer activities. He thinks children should be encouraged to develop skills not emphasised in the school curriculum. He also wants to see summer courses used as a laboratory for innovative education techniques. “We need more learning but not necessarily more schooling.”

Summer learning need not be expensive. David Quinn of the University of Southern California says that even simple interventions like posting reading materials to homes, or sending parents text messages reminding them to make sure their children are reading, can reduce summer learning loss. Lenore Skenazy, founder of the Free-Range Kids movement (which campaigns for children to have more time unsupervised), says that letting children play on their own in parks teaches them important skills. She laments that parents wildly overestimate the risks their children face outdoors (such as being kidnapped by strangers, which is vanishingly unlikely) and so prevent them from exploring.

Some governments are keen to help families that struggle with the summer. Britain’s Department for Education recently announced £2m of funding for programmes providing children with summer activities and meals. Hungary, too, expanded its food aid to children over the holidays, and American campaigners thwarted a government attempt to cut all federal funding for summer activities from this year’s budget. But elsewhere, even data on the effects of the summer holiday are scanty. Chloë Hughes, a youth-worker in Barry, contrasts fond memories of her own childhood summers with the predicament many families face at holiday-time today. “I think a lot of people dread it,” she says.