The proposals for a standardised pattern for the school year, which were published on Monday, are all about planning it in smaller, standardised units rather than the traditional three terms. This helps to avoid the nasty shocks which can take place when half term arrives unexpectedly only four weeks after a new term has begun.

Listening to members of England’s “youth parliament” talk about their experiences in the classroom, we found their most common complaint was of teachers apologising for not being able to finish the syllabus before public examinations. We concluded that the current system - three terms, each punctuated by a week’s half-term holiday - is best treated for curriculum-planning purposes as a six-term year. And that six smaller units of predictable length from one year to the next would make planning easier, and the pupils’ experiences we heard about less common.

Equal-length terms can only be achieved with a five-term year which - in spite of the fact that some technology colleges have operated it successfully for the past 10 years - would be too revolutionary a change to recommend for all English schools. So we opted for predictability and standardisation, with a new fortnight’s holiday in October (to help stave off December stress and absenteeism), a guaranteed fortnight at Christmas and five weeks-plus each summer.

In any six-term year the two autumn term units (of seven weeks-plus) have to be longer than the next four (of around six weeks) - as they already are under current arrangements. We have also built in five days’ flexibility to suit the needs of individual schools.

These proposals take account of all the concerns put to us over a year’s consultation with parents and children as well as teachers, schools and local education authorities. Parents, we discovered, want to be consulted when decisions about their holidays are taken. They often have children in different schools with different holidays, and all too often take them out of school in term time as a result. Our proposals are designed to minimise this.

Because we concentrated throughout on a pattern that would enhance the learning environment for pupils in the school, we have made no recommendations about time for teachers’ professional development. We have kept in close touch with the teacher workload study by PricewaterhouseCoopers which, in its draft report, has made suggestions about this activity being spread across the school day, week and year. We believe that arrangements for professional development are best organised, as happens in some LEAs, by individual schools - whether on specified days or in “twilight” periods or at weekends.

If schools want to vary our proposals to make space for professional development activities, the five flexible days make this possible. We would prefer, however, for this flexibility to be mostly used for “faith” purposes, so that individual schools can celebrate more fully all those religious festivals which are important to the pupils in the school and their parents.

We made some proposals in our original report about how the last two terms in the summer, terms 5 and 6, might be used for examinations and assessment (term 5) and outside the strict boundaries of the national curriculum (term 6), including careers advice in years when that is appropriate.

The process through education is full of significant staging posts at five, 11, 14, 16 and 18. We believe that these points of transfer need a focal point in the school year, for pupils and their parents as well as for teachers.

As the three-year period (2003-6) for which we have made proposals approaches, we believe there will be firm ideas for changes to the timing of public examinations and entry arrangements to higher education. With this in mind we are co-operating with the universities’ body UUK. When that time comes, our framework is designed to accommodate such changes.

But the new framework should not await these developments - it is designed to make space for them when they come on stream. Nor should they await any blessing from ministers. Setting terms and holidays is one job the Government has left to LEAs; foundation and voluntary schools - and indeed independent day schools - for the most part co-operate well with them.

I hope that as a result of our report this co-operation will be strengthened at local level to stabilise children’s learning within a more standardised, yet flexible, framework.

Christopher Price is a former MP and vice-chancellor of Leeds Metropolitan University. He chairs the Local Government Association Independent Commission on the Organisation of the School Year