What Were The Summer Holidays Like For You As A Child?

If you are of a certain age, I am sure you look back at what seemed like endless weeks off school, with sun-drenched days turning into balmy evenings.

Perhaps you went for long walks in the countryside, scrumping for apples or swimming in lakes. If you grew up in the city no doubt you played in the park, or took long bus rides to explore other areas of your city. Halcyon days, and ones which I suspect are not replicated in the experience of youngsters this summer. Few parents now I suspect would allow their children out unaccompanied for extended periods of time, and certainly some of the more Blyton-esque escapades above would be forbidden. Whilst no doubt children are busy during the summer, their activities are more likely to consist of organised play, sometimes at home, and sometimes at a communal locations where kids are chauffeured and chaperoned by parents relieved to have found something to pass the days with.

Or, inevitably, children’s time will have been taken up by screens; cinema trips with friends at the most sociable end, or time spent on tablets or mobiles watching the latest YouTuber at the other more insular end of the screen spectrum. There is little point bemoaning the latter situation. The genie is well and truly out of the bottle with mobile devices and as parents all we can do is to moderate and modulate our children’s viewing experiences. Attempts to ban them are akin to Canute pushing back the sea and it is more our role now to educate pupils in the sensible uses of screens than to reject them. I dare say my parents worried about how much TV I watched as a child, and how much time I wasted playing on my Atari or ZX Spectrum. Plus ça change. There is however a perhaps more worrying problem. Children do spend less time outside than they used to and, allied to that, they are less exposed to the range of experiences I had as a child. We don’t just see that during the holiday.

At school, organising a trip for pupils involves an extraordinary amount of red tape risk assessments, consent forms, medical information etc etc. The effect of this bureaucracy is twofold: it is a significant disincentive for teachers to organise trips, and it restricts the type of activities that can be offered by schools. Many schools no longer offer ski-trips, for example, and the burden of DBS checks and safeguarding means the language exchange trip no longer runs, as we cannot realistically check host families overseas. Amanda Spielman, the new head of Ofsted, spoke out recently on the matter.

She said schools were wrapping pupils in cotton wool, denying them the experiences which allow them to develop resilience, grit and other current government buzzwords. It’s true, but it is unfair to blame schools for this. A culture of blame, intensified by the media and ambulance chasing lawyers, means that schools and teachers are naturally risk averse. I have seen at first hand the scrutiny that teachers are put under should something go wrong on a trip, and I wouldn’t wish it on anyone. Who can blame teachers if the fear of a ruined career or their name being dragged through the tabloid press outweighs their desire to give pupils the opportunity to travel overseas? What’s to be done? Well, as in many areas, it starts with parents.

We need to loosen the apron strings so that our children do have the opportunity to take calculated risks and face challenges. We aren’t protecting them if we deny them that: quite the opposite. It is, to coin a phrase, a big bad world out there and our children need to be tough enough to deal with it.