to give their children an educational leg up in the next stage of their education.

Because children who don’t have any intellectual stimulation in the summer suffer from a syndrome known as learning loss – in essence, they forget some of what they have learned in the previous school year and teachers have to spend time getting everyone back up to speed in the autumn, wasting precious learning and teaching time covering some of the same things again.

Research shows that students lose, on average, a month of the previous year’s learning over the long summer holidays. For subjects like numeracy and spelling it can be more than double that. Children from disadvantaged homes suffer the most. But the good news is that parents can reduce that loss just by staying engaged with their kids learning needs while they are off school.

The most dramatic evidence highlighting summer learning loss comes from researchers, Karl L. Alexander, Doris R, Entwisle and Linda S. Olson from the prestigious Johns Hopkins University in the USA. The children studied were in grades 1 to 5 and the final research report - Schools Achievement and Inequality:A Seasonal Perspective - concluded that academic scores are lowered when a child's learning environment is not enriched during the summer.

The five year study in the 1980s of 650 children from Baltimore was originally designed to compare the academic attainment of children from different socio- economic backgrounds.

But what they discovered was extraordinary. The children from poorer homes were generally not doing as well academically as the children from richer homes because of learning loss during the long summer vacation.

The younger children from poorer homes were learning as well as children from richer homes and at times ‘out-learning’ them while they were at school – as shown by maths and reading scores from tests taken during term. But, crucially, they were losing their advantage over the long summer break when the parents of children from richer homes were typically able to provide stimulating activities for them that enriched their learning.

These children who had interesting summer activities provided for them, travelled and had access to many books, recorded increased reading and maths scores over the summer break when they were tested in the autumn. Despite the lack of formal education in the summer months, engaging activities alone resulted in higher reading and maths scores.

By the time the students reached 9th grade, the accumulated learning loss accounted for two-thirds of the achievement gap between the differing socio-economic groups, and played a significant role in whether students graduated from high school and went on to college.

From this you can see how important is for parents to continue to engage with their children’s learning throughout the summer. So what should you do?
For older kids … they may well be given things to prepare over summer for the new term. You may already have an outline of the topics they will be studying the following year so that you could start having family discussion about them or doing a little gentle research in books or on the internet during the long summer break.

Reading is vitally important – reading just four or five books over summer has positive impact on older kids when they return to school too, according to research.

And conversation - find time to talk to your children about interesting things that come up in the news or in your time together. Answer their questions and if you don’t know the answer, look them up together.

For the youngest …

Keep counting – whether it is doing sums on the miles you are travelling this summer, in the kitchen weighing ingredients or working out the percentage of the shopping bill spent on washing powder. Keep them counting and thinking.

Read – it helps you think better, write better and spell better. Keep your child reading throughout the summer. Buy books, swap books, borrow books – whatever it takes to find something that tickles their fancy. Read yourself – be a good role model.

The write stuff - encourage them to keep a diary whether it is for the whole vacation or just for a holiday trip. The extra creative could write a story play about something historic they might encounter in a museum or a visit to an old house.

Talk – everyone is less stretched now you are not getting the kids off to school every day and getting to bed early because it’s a school night. Now you have time to talk more. Look at www.learnaspirebe.com and try one of the discussion topics on the home page – there is a new one every day.

Visit – museums, zoos, cultural centre, nature reserves, ancient buildings – anything that will get you talking and thinking as a family

Don’t forget – make it fun and get the balance right. Kids need to keep sharp to reduce learning loss, but they need their holidays too!

For a popular description of the Baltimore research read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Boston, MA: Little Brown & Co., 2008.