School Holidays - love or loath?

This morning as I rushed around manically trying to find the school uniform (must start to organize things the night before) and gather up book bags BBC breakfast was on in the background and It was talking about school holidays and how the long 6 weeks summer holidays may be shortened.

I stopped for a minute and tried to concentrate on what was being said  the lady (sorry cant remember her name) from Netmums was arguing that the 6 weeks is great, the bloke on the show (again cant remember his name (well it was early and I did have breakfast bowl to collect up and uniform to organize!) was arguing that the 6 week break is indeed too long and can create a larger rich - poor class divide.

 I do genuinely LOVE the long summer break, it doesn't seem to drag and I am always happy for it to start and reluctant to accept its coming to an end when they have to be all back in school love having lazy mornings and not having the struggle of doing homework in the evenings. I love being able to go places and do things on a whim rather than having to plan everything into the weekends. I love letting the children just be children!

I understand having such a long summer break gives working families a difficult time trying to organize and arrange affordable child care, and I'm lucky that we work from home, but I  also understand that children spending a long time away from education means they can forget and thus means the first few weeks back into school the teachers are doing catch up bringing the children back upto speed again, and I'm not too good at making sure the holidays are filled with educational benefit, more so we use them to just unwind which is probably making the problem of  them 'forgetting' certain things all the more present. So I really do sit on the fence with this one. Personally I probably would be abit sad to see the end of the six week school summer holidays, but if it meant having longer off in the winter, well then I guess it might make things better all round

I know I wouldn't say no to a longer Christmas break I have always thought 2 weeks at Christmas isn't long enough. The cold dark winter mornings never make me excited to be jumping up and get the children packed off to school.

So what do you think of the long Summer holidays, Love them or Loath them?