“summer holidays should be a lot shorter, 4 weeks max. the children get bored and us parents get stressed, not forgetting the extremely high costs. the only people that seem bothered are the teachers. 13 weeks a year holiday and they actually get paid for all these. it's criminal. just how they have got away for it for so long is unbelievable.”

“I agree with Mr B....spot on. Teachers make out they have the pupils at heart, but lets be honest it's all about them.....how 'hard' they work, the inconsiderate (13 weeks a year) holidays and their pension pot blues. Give us a break and get your sleeves rolled and get stuck in!”

“It's a crazy idea to take a week off the summer holidays when the weather is good and the days are long and add a week to the holidays at the end of October when kids are more likely to be stuck inside bored. I also really don't like the idea of shortening the Easter break which is what seems to be happening with the new model. I also think we should listen to teachers and headteachers when they talk about their concerns, they are the professionals.”

“Just wait until the parents realise that their (City) Primary and Secondary children are going to be on a different holiday pattern. The Secondary Academies aren't changing their holidays so these parents will have to find 2 weeks extra childcare.”

“Oh dear, some of the commentators in this forum really haven't a clue about teaching or what it entails.
After 15 years in industry, culminating with running a business with a turnover of £7m+ and around 100 employees across two counties, I decided to take a well-deserved career break and think about 'giving something back' to my community.
Now, with less pressure to be the main breadwinner in my family, I teach full time and for the love of it - certainly not for the money. Earning less than £27k per annum (the national average is £24k), I work from 8am to 7pm daily and if I am lucky, I have 20 minutes for lunch. There is no paid overtime and I do not begrudge marking the work of other tax payers' children's work at home or during weekends. Neither do I resent helping children with their homework during playtimes because their busy 'working parents' haven't had twenty minutes or inclination to help them with it over the weekend (oh, how my heart bleeds for them).
Yes, academic holidays are longer than most, but there isn't a decent teacher out there who doesn't use a considerable chunk of them preparing for the next term or doing all of the other donkey work that we cannot do whilst our hands are tied teaching thirty children.
My working hours and commitments in teaching BY FAR exceed those which I had industry. Both mentally and physically, this is a much more demanding job and my partner (who is a director of a national organisation, commuting to London) sees that I work just as hard as him and that I deserve the holidays I get.
So the next time you experts decide to jump on the bandwagon to slate the teaching profession, I suggest you take a good, hard look at your own working practises and the freedoms which you enjoy in your jobs (e.g. being able to go to the toilet when your bladder tells you to, choosing what time to have your lunch, putting up a 'closed' sign at 5pm and not having to mark test papers at 2pm on a sunny Sunday afternoon whilst everyone else is soaking up the rays). Failing that, why not volunteer to "roll up your sleeves and get stuck in" as volunteers in your local primary school to see what it's really like?
As far as I can see, Mr B's only beef with teachers should be the fact that they clearly never taught him how to use capital letters or to distinguish between the pronouns 'we' and 'us'. And Neonknight23, I wonder if you have told your children's teacher exactly what you think of his/her profession? I guess not.”