I always enjoy the half-term break. Plenty of space on the train to London, no queue for taxis, quiet roads, an empty office – and no MPs at work in the House of Commons either, so nothing to worry about there. But it also got me wondering yesterday: how do we function as a country with so much of the workforce forced to take time off work in staccato bursts so many times a year?

Now that seven out of ten women with dependent children are in work, rather than waiting at home to greet the holidaying offspring, the half-term break has become a seriously disruptive business, to companies as well as to parents. But the alternative to empty desks – sending children to after-school clubs or childminders or other cobbled-together and confusing arrangements – not only isn’t very inspiring, it fails to provide the “down time” that the half-term break is designed to offer a child. They might as well be at school.

The half-term break is a product of the long school terms that we have. Exhausted children (and teachers) cannot make their way through 13 or 14 weeks of school without becoming worn out, a problem that anecdotally seems to be increasing with constant testing and mounting pressure to jump through various performance hoops in our grindingly unimaginative school system. Children’s energy levels cannot be helped, either, by well-meaning parents who pile on violin and ballet and tennis and Mandarin lessons at the end of the school day.

Oddly, the design of the academic year, a matter you would think would be subjected to the most rigorous professional scrutiny – and if necessary revision – in the interests of the best outcome for children, hasn’t been seriously scrutinised since it was invented with the main aim of getting kids out into the fields to bring in the harvest.

The academic year harks back to the preindustrial era when all able-bodied young people were needed to help with harvesting over the summer, before we had combine harvesters and Poles. It is thus designed around a long holiday in July and August, squeezing the rest of the year into three terms arranged around Christmas and Easter, which constrain things still further. The long terms then require a half-term break to give pupils and teachers time to recharge.

The long summer holiday has long been criticised by educationists who say children regress so far in their summer break that it can take them as far as the following spring to catch up again. Even a House of Commons Education Select Committee, hardly a bastion of dangerously radical thinking, recommended eight years ago that schools should switch to a five-term academic year, abolishing the long summer holidays. Each term would be eight weeks long with a two-week break in between, and a minimum four-week summer holiday. And no half terms – the idea being that children can keep up momentum for eight weeks without a break.

Teachers’ unions hated the proposal and it never gained any ground nationally. But one school, the outstanding Greensward College in Essex, did introduce it and has, the school says, seen results improve by at least 20 per cent as a result. Its holidays are two weeks at the end of October and beginning of November; two weeks over Christmas; two in March and at the end of May; and five weeks at the end of July and in August. The Easter break is simply one extra day added to the long weekend. Dropping the long Easter break, a Christian-based holiday that is irrelevant to many pupils anyway, gives the school greater flexibility and certainty, as Easter moves around every year but can be ignored. And the different holiday times enable parents who want to to take their families abroad outside the extortionately priced national school holidays.

Having shorter terms with proper holidays in between them, instead of the half-term week that teachers say is insufficient to recharge children’s batteries, sounds like good sense to me – preferably with a three week March break as well; school today sounds a peculiar form of hell that we have constructed for our kids, and the more freedom they have outside it the better. I don’t know why children at private schools should have longer holidays than the rest.

A more sensible structure might also work out more manageable for working parents. There would be no decline in the overall holiday time for which they would need to organise childcare. But the periods would be less frequent, in longer bursts. In my experience it is working out the childcare arrangement – finding the right person and the correct form – that takes the time. Having worked out the arrangement, it can as well last two weeks as one.

The fact that it’s “only a week”, as at present, doesn’t really help working parents; it simply allows the assumption that they can somehow just scrape through: it’s only a few days, after all. Were the breaks to be a full fortnight, there could be more of an emphasis on helping to create proper structures – enjoyable and imaginative local clubs that cover the full working day, for instance – which would make life more manageable for parents as well as fun for the children.

I don’t know the solution, but it does seem strange that a system set up to cater for the needs of a preindustrial rural economy has not modernised itself for the 21st century. Having teachers unanimously opposed to change (I wouldn’t want to give up a long summer holiday either) doesn’t help.

What also doesn’t help, I suspect, is that, almost uniquely among the working population, MPs give themselves half-term breaks, like children. No childcare problems for them, then. Which may account for them, as a group, not being overly concerned about the half-term problems of the rest of you.

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