When academic research has explored the impact of school summer holidays, it has often focused on the costs to parents and to children’s learning and health.

The childcare juggle, the costs of summer holiday activities and the potential impact of losses in learning or more sedentary behaviour by children in the holidays do have a real impact on families.

But research on the summer break often does not reflect how children and young people feel about school holidays. Children’s rights to both education and health, laid out within the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child, are widely known. There is perhaps less awareness that these UN rights also include children’s right to leisure, as our research has explored. Academically, we know very little about how children and young people experience school holidays as leisure time.

Our research set out how children and young people are often seen as in a process of “becoming”, and that their leisure is viewed as an extension of this: it should have a purpose in developing them as future healthy, educated citizens. Even play is seen not as an activity in itself but as a way to learn skills or increase physical health.

But if we see children as already “being”, not just “becoming”, then we can appreciate that their leisure time could also be the chance to rest and simply do what they want.

Undoubtedly, managing school breaks can be........

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