Today marks the end of the school year in the Canary Islands and, while children will be delighted, it also means the start of the annual summer headache for parents.
Hundreds of thousands of children in primary and secondary education attend class today for the last time in the 2024-25 school year and will not return until at least 9 September, a considerably longer holiday than the summer leave enjoyed by the vast majority of parents.
Many youngsters are enrolled for summer camps which are run during July and August and are a big money-spinner for the organisers, including football and basketball clubs.
In cases where the family budget does not extend to camps and other arrangements such as language courses abroad, grandparents bear a sizeable portion of the child care burden and parks and playgrounds throughout the Canaries witness a noticeable increase in the presence of older relatives accompanying the very young as of now.
The length of school holidays in summer is a hotly-debated topic around this time of year, with various calls made of late to review a calendar that sees children here receive up to double the weeks off enjoyed by their counterparts in, for example, the United Kingdom.
Arguments put forward in support of a change range from the academic – reducing the impact of so-called ‘summer learning loss’, which some experts say can cancel out much of the knowledge acquired during the year – to the social, particularly the financial burden of arranging care for children in less well-off families.
However, most attempts to reopen the debate meet with swift opposition from unions representing the Canaries’ 27,000 teachers who are quick to point out that, contrary to popular belief, a teacher’s work does not stop on 20 June and resume again in mid-September and they need an appropriate summer break to recover from the growing demands placed on them throughout the year.
