{"id":186,"date":"2016-07-13T12:11:22","date_gmt":"2016-07-13T12:11:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/?p=186"},"modified":"2016-07-10T12:15:15","modified_gmt":"2016-07-10T12:15:15","slug":"school-holiday-changes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/2016\/07\/school-holiday-changes\/","title":{"rendered":"School Holiday changes"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">It can be hard to keep track of everything as a parent whilst trying to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\">plan activities with the kids<\/a> so here is a roundup of the big recent stories.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">Lincolnshire breaks the mould<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">Two schools in Lincolnshire have become the first to change from the traditional summer term.\u00a0 White\u2019s Wood and Mercer\u2019s Wood Primary Academies in Gainsborough have confirmed that when the school term ended last week, their children would have a four-week holiday instead of the normal six weeks.\u00a0 Their opinion is that this will both help with learning and allow parents to take their kids on holidays during off-peak times.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">The government welcomes the change and said it was aiming for all schools to be able to set their own term dates in the near future.\u00a0 This is also a move to help combat the fining of parents for removing children during term time.\u00a0 The kids will return to class on 19th August and will have two extra weeks added to terms in September and November as well as in May.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">Easter holiday clash<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">Parents in Dacorum, Hertfordshire, are facing a complex Easter holiday schedule after many of the secondary schools elected to split up the traditional Easter holidays.\u00a0 Their plan would involve a long weekend for Easter then returning to school for four days before then having two weeks off.\u00a0 But it seems that the primary schools in the area, despite being in favour of the change, didn\u2019t put it into place.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">What this means for parents is that if they have a child in both primary and secondary schools, they will be facing a different holiday period for each with only a week overlapping.\u00a0 The schools normally get together each year to organise holidays under the new county council model but somewhere the communications broke down and now parents will find themselves in a potentially awkward position over time off at Easter.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">No fines for Carmarthenshire parents<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">Good news for parents of kids in Carmarthenshire schools after the council announced that next year there would be no fines for taking kids out on pre-booked holidays.\u00a0 The move comes after the announcement of new school holidays and terms times from the Welsh Government that were in conflict for those already published by the schools in the area.\u00a0 The mix up included October half term being a week earlier and the return from the Christmas break also being a week earlier.\u00a0 Even the January 2017 term will be slightly different.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">The confusion led to the county council saying that pupils would not be fined for not attending school for holidays booked in those times, when the parents thought the kids were due to be on holiday.\u00a0 However, the move has yet to be signed off by the government in Cardiff so parents are advised to speak to the school directly if holidays are being affected.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">Inset days used to save parents money<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"color: #000000; font-family: Calibri; font-size: medium;\">A school in Newport has come up with a new way to help ease the pain of parents wanting to take their kids on holiday but finding that peak times are too expensive.\u00a0 Eveswell Primary School have said they will use their five teacher training days all together at the end of the Whitsun half term in June 2016 to allow parents to make use of cheaper holidays<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It can be hard to keep track of everything as a parent whilst trying to plan activities with the kids so here is a roundup of the big recent stories. Lincolnshire breaks the mould Two schools in Lincolnshire have become the first to change from the traditional summer term.\u00a0 White\u2019s Wood and Mercer\u2019s Wood Primary &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/2016\/07\/school-holiday-changes\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;School Holiday changes&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56,78,100],"tags":[54,94,71,87,70,83,93],"class_list":["post-186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-children","category-ideas","category-plan","tag-activities","tag-best","tag-children","tag-family","tag-find","tag-idea","tag-organise"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":187,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186\/revisions\/187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kiddyzone.co.uk\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}