Hell is other people’s simultaneous holidays

Not only did Eyjafjallajökull produce a wonderfully televisual plume. Its timing was also impeccable. If the Icelandic volcano had erupted today, it would have caused far less fuss.

Eyjafjallajökull’s genius was to ground Europe’s aircraft just as families were returning from their Easter holidays. While parents fretted about getting their children home, schools battled to reopen with so many teachers trapped abroad.

There are still questions over how extensive the airspace shutdown needed to be and how much compensation airlines should pay for nature’s acts. But we should also examine the consequences of schools having holidays at the same time.

We assume there is something immutable about the school year’s rhythm. In Europe and North America, it is divided by holidays around Christmas and Easter and a long summer break. The traditional explanation for the summer holiday is that it is an agricultural holdover: farms needed children to help with planting and harvesting.

Leaving aside how few children live on farms today, William Fischel, a Dartmouth economics professor, has reduced the traditional account to burnt stubble. Planting and harvesting take place in spring and autumn, when today’s schools are in session. In fact, as he explained in a 2003 paper, in the mid-19th century, when children really did work on farms, the school year was quite different. There were two terms. One began in November, after harvesting, and carried on until early April, stopping in time for spring ploughing. The next term ran from May to August or September.

The reason for today’s school calendar, at least in the US, is geographical mobility, he argued. Parents wanted children to fit easily into new schools when they moved. The schools wanted that, too, because children arriving mid-term disrupted everyone’s learning. And summer was, weather-wise, the easiest time for families to move.

This does not really explain the school calendar in the UK, where people move around less. There is some variation in holidays: Scotland’s school year is slightly different and private schools tend to have longer breaks than state ones – one of the many curiosities of British educational life being that the more you pay for school, the less of it you get. But private school pupils are a small minority. Not only do English state schools have almost identical holidays; they also have their three half-term breaks at the same time.

It is during half-term, when urban traffic flows unusually freely, that you realise how much congestion comes from children travelling to school at the same time. Companies suffer, too, during half-term, as employees with children insist on taking their leave simultaneously.

France is more sensible, dividing the country into three zones. The zones have slightly different February and April breaks – legend has it so that the ski slopes do not get too crowded – but summer holidays are identical, with the entire country going back to school on the same day in September.

Germany is even more sensible, with the federal states staggering their summer holidays.

Still, much of Europe is off in August, when the descent on the Mediterranean reveals the current approach to school breaks in all its stupidity. The resorts are unbearably crowded. The locals, having to cram their money-making into a few weeks, are over-worked and bad-tempered. The heat is intolerable. June and September are the best Med months, not August.

Worst of all for families, travel and hotel prices can be twice as high as in term time. British government ministers have criticised the way holiday prices leap at the moment school breaks up, which suggests a less than tip-top grasp of supply and demand.

But the current arrangements do not suit travel companies either. The fluctuation in business means aircraft and ferries often travel with empty seats during term time.

Apartment owners force travel companies that need rooms in summer to take them from April to October, so that they have to sell them at cost price either side of the August holidays. The UK Association of Independent Tour Operators has pleaded with the government to spread out school holidays.

There are arguments against. There will be parents with children in different schools moaning that they cannot have a family holiday. They make good media copy, but they should not dictate everyone else’s life. Public examinations have to occur at set times, but that should not prevent holidays before or after varying by a week or two.

Parts of the US have “year-round schooling”, with shorter summer holidays and breaks at different times of year. Not everyone likes it. But it should not take a volcanic eruption to show what a bad idea it is for so many to go on holiday at the same time.

michael.skapinker@ft.com

More columns at www.ft.com/michaelskapinker