Beat the summer slide: what six weeks off does to your child’s progress

Everyone needs a proper break, children most of all. But a summer with no learning at all usually means walking back into school in September a step behind where they finished in July. Here is what actually happens over the holidays, and the small things that stop it.

What the “summer slide” actually is

Skills you don’t use go rusty. That’s true for a language, a musical instrument, or a sport, and it turns out to be true for schoolwork too. Leave maths and writing untouched for six weeks and a lot of children quietly lose some of what they worked hard to build up over the year. Teachers call it the summer slide, and it has been studied for decades.

One often-quoted review of the research put the average loss at roughly a month of learning across the holidays. That figure hides something important, though: the loss isn’t shared evenly across subjects.

Maths takes the biggest hit

Reading tends to hold up reasonably well, because children still bump into words all summer in books, on screens, on signs, in conversation. Maths is different. It rarely comes up by accident on a beach holiday, so without a bit of practice the number facts and methods start to fade.

Studies generally put the maths loss at somewhere between one and three months of progress, and some go further, suggesting children can forget a big chunk of the maths they learned that year. For a child heading into SATs, the 11+, or the first proper year of GCSE content, that is ground you would much rather not give back.

Why a month matters more than it sounds

A month here or there doesn’t sound like a disaster. Two things make it one. First, teachers usually spend the opening weeks of term re-teaching rather than moving on, so the slide eats into the whole class’s progress, not just your child’s. Second, it stacks up. A child who slips a little every summer can watch the gap grow year on year, at exactly the point the work is getting harder.

How to turn the slide into a head start

You don’t need to run a school day at the kitchen table. A small, regular amount of focused learning is enough to protect progress, and often to build on it. The summers that work tend to look like this:

• Little and often. A weekly hour beats a frantic fortnight in late August, because what keeps skills warm is consistency.
• Aimed at the right topics. Working on the bits a child finds hard, and getting a look at what’s coming next year, is worth far more than a stack of random worksheets.
• Actual teaching, not just videos. Children get unstuck faster when someone can spot a misconception and fix it on the spot.
• In a small group, so the session stays sociable and motivating while the tutor still tailors it to each child.
• Light enough to leave the holidays intact. A couple of daytime sessions a week is plenty.

What a realistic summer looks like

For most families, one or two subjects at an hour a week keeps things ticking over nicely. Children working towards something big, SATs, the 11+, or the GCSE years, usually do well with a bit more, especially in maths and the topics they’ll meet first in the new term.

The holidays should be for resting and having fun, and they can be. But a steady hour or two of good teaching each week is one of the simplest ways to make sure your child starts the new school year confident and a step ahead, rather than spending September catching up.

Sources: research summaries on summer learning loss (reviews of multiple studies pointing to around one month of average loss, with maths most affected) and the Education Endowment Foundation Teaching and Learning Toolkit estimate of +4 months’ progress for small-group tuition.