2023-07-03 00:00:31
Catherine Delahaye / Getty Images Two six-year-old children playing on the beach.
Catherine Delahaye / Getty Images
According to OECD figures, with its 16 weeks of school holidays, France is better off than its European neighbours.
HOLIDAYS – Sixteen weeks a year, half of which during the summer. This is the number of school holidays granted to young French children who are educated until the end of the secondary cycle. If the children are happy to trade their schoolbag for a well-deserved vacation, Emmanuel Macron judges that the students’ vacations are too long. On a visit to Marseille, the president announced on Tuesday June 27 that he wanted “reopen a debate which is that of school time in the year”.
“We have children who sometimes have two and a half months of vacation, some almost three months”he lamented, considering that this had the consequence of “stuffing the children’s weeks”. An echo also to the situation of the graduates who tend to desert the classes towards the end of the year. Emmanuel Macron wants to balance school time and vacation time which, according to him, is a factor of inequality.
Since school holidays are back on the agenda, Le HuffPost compared their duration in France to those of some of our neighboring countries in order to see if the little French really have more holidays.
Lower school holidays than other European countries
According to figures from OECD, with its 16 weeks of school holidays, France is better off than its European neighbours. In Spain, pupils are 14 weeks old, 12 in Germany, or 15 in Italy.
On the other hand, according to a report by Eurostat, the statistical body of the European Commission, the organization of the school year in Europe, which compared the organization of leave in 44 European education systems over the year 2022/2023, with its eight consecutive weeks of vacation in the summer, France is one of the reasonable countries, as you can see in our map below.
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A rhythm of holidays and more hours of lessons
During his announcements, Emmanuel Macron quoted our neighbors: “ How do Germans manage to have sport in the afternoon? Because they have school time that is distributed differently throughout the year “, he argued. Indeed, if a particularity of France is to be noted, it is that of the regular alternation of seven weeks of lessons followed by two weeks of vacation and this four times in the year (autumn, Christmas, winter and Easter) .
A regularity that is an exception. For the autumn holidays, for example, 19 countries have only one week, some three (Czech Republic), others nothing at all (for 13 countries). Thus in Belgium, as in the United Kingdom, the autumn and winter holidays last only one week.
What further differentiates France from its neighbors is the number of days spent in school. According to Recommended annual instruction time in full-time compulsory education in Europe 2020/2021France is one of the countries with the most teaching hours in Europe.
In France, there are approximately 9,000 hours of compulsory education, whereas the European average is 7,700. college.
But France is also the country with the fewest class days in school and college with around 162 days compared to 170 to 190 on average in Europe. Thus, if the little French certainly have a lot of weeks of vacation, but these make it possible to compensate for the particularly heavy schedules that they have to assume all year round.
See also on le HuffPost :
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