Summer holidays
How long should the summer holidays be?
- 5 weeks is great, more isn't needed51%
- 6 to 8 weeks is ideal31%
- 10 weeks or more, like in the south18%
The competition has ended.
Summer holidays – are five weeks enough?
2.6.2026
Translation: Veronica Bielawski
As far as kids are concerned, school weeks drag on and holidays never come round often enough. If you ask me, the time in between them flies by. I think the distribution is ideal – even if the world of holidays isn’t a fair one.
«But I don’t wanna go back to school!» It’s one of those five Sundays each year that’s filled with sighing and grumbling about school starting again. Whether it’s spring, summer or autumn, my kids – who get on perfectly well once they’ve settled back into a routine – claim they could always do with another week off. Every time I hear that, I think to myself, «Hey, you just had two weeks off!»
That said, I do know the feeling. And I know how uninspiring it feels to hunt down all the school stuff that’s been put out of sight, out of mind. Still, I play the motivator – the one who holds forth on the value of everyday routine, without which time off would simply become time, with no beginning and no end. Still nice – but it would lose that sense of freedom and eventually feel arbitrary.
As far as the kids are concerned, other nations – the Dutch, especially, who are seemingly everywhere all the time – get significantly more holidays. My philosophical ramblings are just as little comfort to them as the spectre of adult life I paint: «Five weeks of summer holidays isn’t enough for you? I get five weeks a year!» The only thing that earns me more eye rolls is when I open with «back in my day» and then go on about Saturday school. Yeah, yeah, old man. None of that changes what they believe:
- They’ve got it tough.
- The Dutch are seemingly everywhere year round, so they must get loads more time off.
- I exaggerate when I talk about how things used to be.
How much truth is there to this? How fair is the world of school holidays? Who benefits from longer breaks – and for whom might they actually be a disadvantage? Before I look abroad, let me start at home.
Perfectly spread throughout the year, but unfairly rationed
Learning is easier when you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. That’s why I think school holidays where we are in Zurich (and across most of German-speaking Switzerland) are perfectly distributed: one long – but not excessively so – summer break of five weeks, plus two weeks each in autumn, winter and spring. Never do the kids have to grit their teeth for more than two months at a stretch. And they’re never out of it so long that getting back into schoolwork feels impossible. It’s not just a good setup for learning – it’s a good setup for life.
In Britain, a similar model has been up for debate for some time: scrap the sixth week of summer holidays, add more in autumn. According to its proponents, it would lead to easier childcare in summer, reduce stress in autumn and shorten the stretches of time when children from difficult backgrounds are left to their own devices.
I can see the logic. The way we do it in Zurich works. I need to be careful not to draw my kids’ attention to the fact that holidays aren’t spread evenly across Switzerland, though. They’d be only too happy to take ten weeks of summer holidays like they get in Ticino. In a cantonal comparison of summer holidays (in German), the south leaves everyone else trailing.
Even though Ticino balances out the long summer holidays with shorter breaks in the cooler months, over the course of the year schoolchildren there get roughly two extra weeks off compared to many German-speaking cantons. French-speaking Switzerland stretches its summer out akin to the French, while Basel gives kids six weeks off in summer like Germany.
Which model is more demanding, which is smarter, which is better? Hard to say – it depends on the framework. Some bring up «summer learning loss» – the theory that maths, reading and spelling skills measurably decline during long breaks from learning. According to it, the first four weeks of vacation are entirely positive, before early learning gains begin to fade away.
Others place greater weight on the psychological relief, new experiences and freedom that (primarily) privileged children enjoy in summer – those whose parents don’t face a childcare problem but have financial means for summer camps, travel, courses and the like. This is far from boredom, idling and switching your brain off, though. During the holidays, the social divide widens even further. In the end, what matters is the result: Ticino can point out that, despite its longer holidays, it doesn’t fall behind in cantonal comparisons of academic performance (in German).
Even if research attests to learning advantages for a model with blocks spread well across the year, holiday length is a matter of tradition to some extent. It’s rooted in heat or historical reasons and hard to reform, because it gives structure to the sunny side of life. One thing won’t change: it’s always hardest when you’re the one who has to go to school while relatives and friends are already – or still – on holiday.
The Dutch and other nations
The idea that other countries – the Netherlands in particular – must constantly be on holiday came from my kids’ first-hand observations. Some nations are disproportionately represented whenever they have time off. Winter sports holiday in the Bernese Oberland? Half of the Netherlands is already there. Spring holidays in the south? «Raad eens wie er in de meerderheid is in het hotel?» (guess who’s in the majority at the hotel). Summer holidays in the Dutch province of Gelderland? Germans from the Ruhr dominate. The Dutch – always off somewhere!
So, it may come as a surprise that over the course of the year, they actually get roughly one week less holidays. It just doesn’t seem like it, because the country staggers its holidays by region. In terms of holiday length, southern European countries like Greece, Italy, France and Spain are in the lead, taking breaks during the hot months – for good reason. As a central European schoolchild, you sometimes cast an envious eye at those long summer breaks by the sea. But the real comparison to make is with Scandinavia and the Baltic states.
The fact that less time in school doesn’t necessarily mean worse performance is most clearly demonstrated by Estonia. There, summer holidays alone are roughly two and a half months long – yet the country’s Pisa results are excellent. The model works because of a high level of equal opportunity: parents’ social status influences academic success far less than elsewhere. Up to ninth grade, all pupils are taught together rather than being sent to different schools at an early age. That too may help reduce stress by allowing children to develop without the pressure of academic selection.
Things were more relaxed in the old days – up to a point
Despite being «blessed» with school on Saturday myself, I’ll give the kids this much – daily life wasn’t actually harder back then. Nowadays, kids’ lives are packed with more appointments and far more structure than before. This has consequences. According to a Pro Juventute study (in German), a third of children and young people are under high levels of stress. The pressures of the online world and the real world force their way into life with a vengeance. From a young age, children are confronted with so many issues that switching off gets harder and harder.
Winding down and tuning out the world was easier before – be it figuratively, or literally by driving down south. At most, you’d exchange the odd postcard. Being away meant diving into a whole new world. I’m grateful to belong to a generation that got to have that experience. School holidays were about leisure and freedom, setting off and having adventures. Seeing new things, coming home and telling everyone about it at the end of the holidays – instead of being constantly in touch. There was something to that.
Before tourism was invented (linked podcast in German), the fact was that when school closed, children were needed as helping hands in agriculture. Maybe I’ll suggest to my kids that we spend two weeks harvesting potatoes this autumn. We’ll see if they’d still be keen to tack on a third week of holidays then.
Header image: Shutterstock/ID-VIDEO
Michael Restin
Senior Editor
Michael.Restin@digitecgalaxus.chSimple writer and dad of two who likes to be on the move, wading through everyday family life. Juggling several balls, I'll occasionally drop one. It could be a ball, or a remark. Or both.
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