Yahoo News Private schools planning a longer summer term
Private schools are preparing to lengthen the summer term, The Telegraph has learned, amid fears that the Government’s attempts to get children back to the classroom will flounder.
Headmasters at some of the country’s leading private schools are drawing up plans to start the Easter holidays earlier this year to accommodate a longer summer term with the aim of maximising time that children will be able to be back in the classroom.
Earlier this month, the Prime Minister confirmed that schools will not reopen after February half-term, and instead said that he hoped they would be able to from March 8, depending on the data.
Dr Richard Maloney, headmaster at Uppingham School in Rutland, has already written to parents to notify them of the change in term dates.
He said that given there is “no explicit commitment” to get all pupils back in school on March 8, adding that he believes it is “likely that only primary schools will be permitted to resume on-site education on that date. Furthermore, secondary schools could well be ‘staggered’ in their return over the subsequent three weeks.”
Dr Maloney went on to tell parents: “From our point of view, this is not good news. However, rather than railing into the wind, we have chosen to do something positive to best benefit Uppinghamians.”
He explained that the spring term will end a week earlier, on March 20 rather than March 27, and the summer term will also begin a week early on April 11 rather than April 18.
This means the school can “keep online teaching to a minimum this term and, with an earlier start to the summer term, maximise the time all pupils can spend in school”, he added.
Uppingham School, which charges £38,700-a-year for boarders, was founded in 1584 by Archdeacon of Leicester, counts the comedian and actor Stephen Fry among its alumni.
“Other private schools are thinking about this,” a source said. “They know that the track record of the Government is that dates always slip and we can’t take the risk of being let down again. There is deep frustration.”
This week, Tory MPs renewed their calls for an explanation of why we schools in England cannot follow the lead of Scotland and Wales and begin a phased reopening after February half-term.
The Welsh Government confirmed on Friday that children aged three to seven would be back in the classroom from 22 February, along with some older children on vocational courses.
Mark Harper, a Tory MP and chair of the Covid Recovery Group, urged ministers to start easing restrictions from mid-February, saying: “We need to know why English schools need to be kept shut for longer given the great news about the vaccination rollout.”
Barnaby Lenon, chair of the Independent Schools Council, said: “Obviously there will be individual schools that wish to do their own thing, but before they decide to do that, they need the agreement of the governors, their insurance company and the buy-in of parents.
“We are all supporting the current constraints, painful as they are. It’s only when it begins to feel unreasonable that we won’t - and it can only begin to feel unreasonable if the level of Covid in any area has fallen to a pretty low level.”
