School's out for the summer - or is it?

Happy days: children from Germany enjoy their school summer holiday whenever it happens to fall Photo: Brian Smith

Generally, being an English-speaker living abroad gives you a bit of a march on the people of your host country. After all, half the world looks to America and the UK for their music and restaurant novelties, for their fashion trends and their new management buzzwords, so going back to London can become a bit like looking into the not-too-distant future: currently, for Germany, I foresee resurgent dubstep, faux-trashy pop-up burger-eateries, the continued dominance of leggings (but now in animal print), and a period of "bleeding-edge drill-down" swirling in my UK crystal ball.

On the other hand, the last few years have seen the one-way current eastwards start to change direction: on a recent visit home, I landed up at a hip bar under the railway arches at Peckham Rye whose Berlin-obsession would have been obvious even without the bass-heavy soundtrack from "Berlin Calling" rattling a range of Teutonic beer-bottles in the fridges. And on issues like the desirability of a mixed economy or cutting youth unemployment, the wind is, for the first time in almost 30 years, clearly blowing from Germany to the UK, not the other way round.

So it's probably just a matter of time until the British start to look to Germany for a resolution to the latest political hot potato that the rather fearless Michael Gove is currently juggling: school holidays.

If you're not in the know, Mr Gove's tenet is that the UK's centrally set school terms are an anachronism from our agricultural past that should be abolished so children are not out of contact with schoolwork for a long period in the summer, and so working parents are not obliged to take holidays or sort out child care during otherwise "busy periods" like October.

Furthermore, the Secretary for Education has indicated that he is unhappy about the number of parents taking their children out of school during term time to avoid higher travel costs, and feels that spreading school holidays across the calendar would reduce the pressure on prices by speading demand for flights and hotels.

This last issue occurred to Germany back in 1964, when the heads of the country's regional governments – who are responsible for state education – were called together to stagger the summer holidays in such a way "as to avoid all of the regions' leisure-seekers leaving for and returning from their holiday at the same time, with the corresponding detrimental effects on traffic and demand for accommodation in tourist areas", to quote from the resulting agreement.

The agreement divided the country up into five roughly equal population blocks, which were all to set six contiguous weeks of summer holiday between mid-June and mid-September. The blocks would be put on to a rolling system so each area got a different summer holiday each year, with the advantages and drawbacks that go with each – June having less predictable weather, but longer days; September being meteorologically more stable, but with less daylight.

What looks like a perfect system at first glance is actually far harder to implement. Right from the start, one big question loomed over the whole thing: what happens when one group "rolls off" the system with a late summer holiday and "rolls back on" in June with an early one? How do you condense the curriculum into a school year that could be up to two months shorter?

The system's answer is that other holidays should be shortened or lengthened to ensure there are roughly equal school years composed of six-week terms: autumn or spring holidays can be set at one week or two, or can be left out – especially if, say, a late Easter combines with an early summer break, in which case the equivalent of the British "spring half-term" in May is cut out entirely.

But the German regions' answer, mainly the southern block, is less flexible: from the start, Bavaria and Baden-Württemburg had holidays pegged to the end of the period available, meaning southern Germany has gone on holiday at the beginning of August for around 50 years. The justification was that it was a mainly agricultural and tourist area, and later holidays would allow children to help with the harvest and parents to take their holiday after the rest of Germany had gone home; now the South is Germany's richest area and most reliant on hi-tech industry, the rest of Germany is clamouring for them to take the risk of a rainy June so other children can enjoy a balmy August, but to no avail.

After all, Bavaria has had enough of moving holidays. For a brief period in the Nineties and early 2000s, it allowed schools to set some holidays – ie decide whether to give a Friday off if a national holiday fell on a Thursday – but the chaos that resulted for families with children at different schools, led the region to put paid to the idea in 2005.

And so the accusations fly: "You just want better weather!" say the North; "You disrespect our culture!" say the South, while keeping quiet about the role standard holidays might play in helping them engineer better exam results. Meanwhile, the Hamburg education authority gets its own back on Bavaria by insisting on two weeks of "ski holiday" in March. That's when the southern state's Alpine slopes are at their snowiest and sunniest, and Bavarian children watch jealously as their Northern cousins swoosh past their classroom windows.

Indeed, after years of discussion, Hamburg and a few others have gone ahead and set holidays for 2014 and 2015 in July and August, disregarding the agreement in the same spirit as the southern block, so it looks like Germany may end up with more or less standard summer holidays after all.

And in my experience, one thing's for sure: the last 50 years seem to prove that it will take more than staggered Sommerferien to combat Stau on the Autobahn, and ticket prices are higher whenever any of the regions are on their summer holiday – ie for three months of the year, rather than just six weeks.