Spanish children enjoy a summer break of ten weeks, two and a half months, which means that we have the second longest vacation in Europe and are similar to those of North African countries.
On the northern shore of the Mediterranean, Greece has one week more than Spain, while Italy one less and France two less. The United Kingdom and Germany do choose to shorten them to six weeks and distribute others throughout the course.
This is reflected in a world map prepared by the Smartick data visualization team, in which the different durations of the summer holidays can be seen by colour.
In America, there are several countries that have holidays similar in duration to Spain (Venezuela, Colombia, Peru and the US) but none have more.
The summer school holidays in Spain, according to the study, have remained similar in duration over the last decades “despite the scientific evidence that, during these holidays, learning losses occur that accentuate the possibilities of suffering school failure”.
In Europe, many countries have vacations for more than two months, which do not coincide with family permits, so parents go to town halls, schools and companies that offer camps and different educational experiences.
Regarding how the summer school break affects children depending on whether or not they do some intellectual activity, the research warns that the differences in school performance “are cumulative between those who do and do not do it and they get bigger every year.”
In this sense, he points out that governments such as Andalusia, decided, for example, to reinforce the students they wanted with programs made especially to recover knowledge in Mathematics and Language in the month of July.
Although the study points out that there is not always a clear correlation between temperature and the length of school vacations, it is given as an explanation for the fact that vacations in the Middle East are the longest on the planet, with 13 weeks in Iran and Afghanistan and 12 in Arabia or Iraq. In China and India, which provide much of the world’s school population right now, vacations are reduced to six weeks.
Smartick offers the possibility of doing daily Mathematics exercises in personalized 15-minute sessions thanks to Artificial Intelligence, with the aim that children arrive at school in September “in good mental shape and with consolidated habits, even if they have been able to rest”.
According to a study by Johns Hopkins University, carried out by sociologists Kart Alexandre and Doris Entwisle, “more than half of the curricular gap of primary school students is due to the practice or not of knowledge in summer.”
“Ten weeks, like the holidays we have in Spain, is enough time for children to rest, but, at the same time, they have time every day to practice Mathematics and Reading, which are the two key skills in primary education and which will prevent them from failing at school”, explains the co-founder of Smartick, Javier Arroyo.
According to the criteria of The Trust Project