School holiday revamp proposed for Brighton and Hove

The city council is set to explore making school holidays cheaper for parents in Brighton and Hove, by coordinating inset days to make a long weekend, or even creating an additional week off when holidays are less expensive.

Cllr Tom Bewick, chair of the children and young people's committee, said: 'If there is something we can do to offer lower-income families in particular the chance to take holidays that would otherwise be unaffordable then I think it's worth exploring. Being able to take a cheap family holiday in March, for example, would make a huge difference to thousands of local people - including of course our teachers.

'The long summer holiday goes back to the nineteenth century when children helped bring in the harvest. It's time to take a fresh look at this and try and find a consensus for what works best for families in the twenty-first century.'

The ideas will be discussed at Monday's committee meeting, and if agreed, the council will speak to schools, and consult on a proposal.

Individual schools make their own decisions about when they take their inset days, but term and holiday dates set by the council have to be followed by all the city's community schools. The city's academies and voluntary-aided faith schools are not obliged to follow these dates, but all of them currently do so.

Term time dates are usually set between 12 and 18 months in advance, so anything that might be agreed through new proposals would not come into effect until 2017-18.