One simple calendar tweak by your headteacher could save your family £1,400 on holidays

Same hotel. Same flights. Same stretch of sunshine. The only difference? The dates fall inside school holidays, when demand is at its highest and prices inevitably follow.

It's not a mystery and it's not a rip-off. When millions of families are all forced to travel in the same narrow windows, prices rise. That's how demand works. The real question is why we're still funnelling every family into the same few weeks and then acting surprised that it costs more.

Every year, families across England and Wales face the same impossible trade-off. Book in term time and risk a fine. Book in the holidays and pay a premium created by a system that compresses all demand into a handful of weeks.

Parents aren't doing anything wrong. They're caught in a structural problem that nobody's fixing.

Nearly half a million families were fined last year for term-time absences, 93% of those for holidays. But the true picture is bigger still. Our research shows half of parents are planning a term-time trip this academic year. Not because they don't value education, but because the system leaves them with no good option.

The good news? There's a practical, achievable fix that protects learning time, spreads demand and is already in headteachers' hands.

It's called Inset Week.

By grouping the five existing inset days into a single dedicated week, staggered regionally, families travel across a wider range of dates.

Demand spreads. Prices come down naturally. No teaching days are lost. The training still happens. Children stay in school.

And it works.

Around 100 schools across the country already run an Inset Week. Python Hill Academy introduced one seven years ago and Headteacher Andy Stirland calls it a common-sense solution, one that's improved attendance, while parents at the school report saving up to £1,000 on their holidays.

The best part is this doesn't need government intervention, around 25,000 headteachers across England and Wales already have the power to decide how inset days are arranged. Progress can happen now, school by school.

That's why we're calling on parents to write to their children's headteacher and ask for an Inset Week and it’s why we've even created a ready-made template to make it easy.

Holiday prices don't have to be this high, we just need to stop forcing every family to travel at the same time.

Let's fix it.

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Zoe Harris is the Chief Customer Officer at On the Beach

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