That is also a good point that someone has added in the comments section immediately afterwards.

Staggering the school holidays as the comment on this story suggests works well if all the teachers live in the same area as they work but is a nightmare for them if they don't. In the part of Scotland were I live the 4 authorities with adjoining boundaries do stagger the mid-term holidays and tend to start and end the summer break at different times too. But a lot of teachers choose to live in one of the more rural authorities but work in the one large city in the region because that is were there are the greatest number of schools and the biggest employment opportunities for teachers. This means come eg the October break, their own school might be closed one week and the one their kids go to (as little as 10/15 mins drive apart!) will be shut the following week. So they never get the option of going away as a family during the 'Tattie' holiday! Similarly, in the summer, they end up with just a 4 week window in which they can take a holiday then.

Some friends of mine tried to get round this by placing their kids in the nearest school in the authority where they worked rather than lived but the kids themselves hated it because none of their friends from around where they lived went to that school. Similarly, it was harder for them to socialise of an evening with the new friends they made in school because none of them lived nearby. Pester power meant that they ended up transferring the kids back to the school closest to the family home after all. Nowadays, they wouldn't have had any option because the authority they worked for is less and less willing to take kids who live outwith the council boundary anyway

And this is before you have to deal with the extreme situation that was common in Lancashire and the Potteries where the mills and factories in different small towns would all shut for 'Wakes' fortnight at different times so that even within the same local authority the schools would all have to close at different times or face the prospect of there being no kids around at all! The worst situation was the one my brother and his partner had to cope with whereby he worked in a primary that closed down at a different time to the secondary that she worked in - at least they had no kids at that point. Imagine the extra chaos that would have been caused if they had children who attended a different school again! A further complication for her was the 'Wakes' fortnight for most of the parents at her school was in June during the GCSE exam season, so more often than not she had to work anyway invigilating the practical exams for her subject area! Families with kids taking public exams that year just never got a summer holiday at all under those circumstances - or else had to leave the 16/18 yr old at home with Granny while the rest of them went on holiday!

SM

It also causes problems for extended families which may live in different areas but like to holiday together, being an opportunity for them all to meet up. Some of our local schools started staggering the holidays, and even junior and senior schools did not always have the same dates, which was a nightmare for parents. Thank goodness I don't have to worry about school holidays now, except to avoid them like the plague.

Even though i have no small children to think about i now have to worry about hubby's holiday during the summer . i work in school , he doesn't so when booking holidays he goes into work and asks those on his shift with children if they are going away and what dates so that names dont have to be drawn out of the hat to see who gets what . They used to work a shut down rota but not any more .