Times letters: Cutting school summer holiday to four weeks

Sir, “All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born”: Yeats’s Easter 1916 evokes our times again. The familiar world is overturned but opportunities arise for positive change. In his Thunderer (“School summer holidays should be cut to four weeks”, Apr 28), Lee Elliot Major rightly asks us to focus on the chronic underperformance of children from poorer homes. Reducing the leviathan sprawl of the summer break would help: for too many disadvantaged children, their holidays are no more likely to involve reading books, trips to museums or even a game of cricket than they are to include a flight to the moon. If the holidays are unchanged, schools like mine, with the right resources and expertise, could run top-up lessons for these children over