During a trip to Marseille on June 27, 2023, the President of the Republic considered that the summer holidays were too long and responsible for the exhaustion of the students.
Emmanuel Macron called for “rethink” school time and the duration of the summer holidays, during a visit to Marseille on Tuesday 27 June. According to him, some children have two and a half or three months of vacation during the summer season and the consequence, “vsis that we stuff the weeks of our children”.
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“It’s because the children leave too early and have holidays that have become rather longer over the past 20 years that you have your same children who arrive exhausted every evening”, he assured. Hence the question: are the famous long holidays longer today than 20 years ago?
Ten fewer days of summer vacation in 20 years
The assertion of the President of the Republic is false. It’s even the opposite: the summer holidays have frankly shortened in the last 20 years, losing almost ten days, according to calculations by franceinfo from the archives of school calendars from 1960 to today, posted online by the Ministry of Education. They lasted 65 days in the early 2000s, but gradually decreased to only 56 or 57 days in the 2020s.
Year-round, moreover, the number of school vacation days is fairly stable, even slightly down. Since the 2010s, elementary, middle and high school students have had 112 or 113 days off per year, while those who were in school in the 2000s had around 115. School holidays therefore lasted two or three days longer 20 years ago.
The duration of the school holidays is stable, because the reduction of the summer holidays is compensated by the lengthening of the All Saints holidays. These lasted only one week 20 years ago, then ten days, before increasing to two weeks during the 2012-2013 school year.
Cumulative vacation time stable for decades
If we go back further in time, we still find more or less the same figures and above all the same downward trend. For example, during the 1960-1961 school year, students had 119 vacation days in total, one week more than students in the 2020s.
At the time, the summer holidays were even longer, lasting 80 days, or more than two and a half months, while the other All Saints’ Day and winter holidays were much shorter, reaching only four and five days. .
Knowing of this stability, the Lille branch of the SE-Unsa teachers’ union replied to the President of the Republic on Twitter that “the only extension of the holidays [était] the flight of high school students this year, following the reform of the baccalaureate of a certain Emmanuel Macron”while the specialty written tests took place in March.