If some of the people who run education in our neck of the woods get their way this will be the last long summer holiday ever, so it’s time for those of us who support the six week break to stand up and be counted.

It started in the usual way with the last day of term and the farewell parties. Our headteacher has completed advanced NCSL training so he knows that to avoid too much excitement on the last day you should close the school early. This worked well the first year he tried it, except that the shops got flour bombed instead of us which did not go down well with the local community. The problem now is that the kids are wise to the fact that they hardly get in the door before we’re having a quick assembly and goodbye. This year, the clever ones brought the flour in on the previous day!

One problem with the early close is that the time remaining for the staff party increases correspondingly. A few years ago, well perhaps more than a few, staff parties were worthy of that name. Anyone who has drunk half a bottle of sherry and missed lunch, played Montmorency – a bizarre and cruel activity that involves being prostrate on the floor and hitting people with rolled-up newspapers - seen the PE staff dressing up in each others kit, or watched the office staff dancing to ‘Staying Alive’ will understand the depths to which collective hysteria can drive relatively normal people.

However, things have changed along with the age profile of the profession. The retiring staff are wheeled out for a quick goodbye and a Marks and Spencer gift – handily redeemable for cash – while the younger ones just get their names read out. That is since the rules were changed so that you have to be in the place at least five years to get a mention. The NQTs have been so beaten down by their induction year that they’re updating their lesson plans and discussing next year’s CPD entitlement when they should be getting plastered, and the heads of department can’t wait to get out of the place and pack their roof boxes so that they can beat the crowds of other teachers to the Channel Tunnel.

That is where the next bit of the holidays goes. For most teachers it means two weeks of stressful close-proximity living in a campsite somewhere near La Rochelle. Things are made worse when you read, in a three-day old, second-hand copy of your favourite newspaper, that the average 39-year-old male now spends £1400 per family member on his annual holiday. The problem with this is that since Mr Average is doing a fly drive round the Rockies or sweltering in the Caribbean, the only people left in the campsite bar are teachers. Half of these are in a state of catatonic despair, blotchy red from the sun, spotted by mosquitoes and with a permanent headache from drinking cheap wine out of plastic bottles. The others are still doing the job. Only teachers can sit on sun loungers and discuss their attendance policies and how they’ve spent Estelle’s last hand-out with something approaching enthusiasm. This educational conversation is even more popular than the ones about the benefits of hypermarket shopping and the best way to avoid the Peripherique on Saturday afternoon.

The annual holiday is soon over and easily forgotten, since one of the kids left your new digital camera on the beach and so it’s time for the real holiday to start. This is a good time to begin THE project, whatever the project is. If it is a rainy August, strip out the bathroom ready for tiling, wood panelling and a click together wood effect floor and a blistering heatwave is guaranteed to start that afternoon. If it is warm, start the foundations for your new B and Q decking and watch the thunderclouds gather. One useful ongoing project is getting fit which is soon reduced to cycling to the Dog and Duck. The important thing about a holiday project is that you will actually be quite pleased to be called away after the thunderstorm floods the computer room or it turns out that someone forgot to send in the English coursework marks. The latter will take a couple of days to sort out (or a couple of weeks if the coursework went to the examination board that never answers the ‘phone) and then it will be results time, stocktaking, cupboard clearing and policy revisiting.

And, then it’s day one of the new school year. The bathroom looks wrecked, the insurance company is quibbling over the camera, the family is in a state of crisis, and you keep getting e-mails from that odd woman in Swansea who got so excited when you told her about the school’s discipline policy in the campsite bar. How would you ever fit that into a four week break let alone be able to say, on day one, that what you really enjoyed was ‘getting away from the job’?