As Uk schools have shut this week end until the 1st week in September I know its a silly question, but do all Northern Hemisphere countries Take their Summer vacations in the same time period?
And Conversely do Southern Hemisphere countries Take a Winter break of say 2 weeks corresponding to the Norths summer Beginning end July early August?

It varies here in North America.
In Ontario, children finish school at the end of June, and go back the second week of September. Their summer vacation usually amounts to about ten weeks. That's an awfully long time when you are a parent.

This site has some information on school holidays around the world:

jours-feries

Thanks dg That's a very informative link

Every so often somebody suggests that we have shorter school holidays but more terms.Nothing ever comes of it

How many of our children are now out in the fields helping with the harvest? That's why we have long vacations in Summer.The children and nearly everyone else would be needed to work then.

The lawyers in England also had a very long vacation then because of the harvest: the litigants, witnesses and jurors were too occupied in farming to be free to attend court and many of the lawyers and judges themselves had agricultural estates.We stopped having that long vacation some years ago. It was not appropriate any more. So why do we keep its equivalent for schoolchildren?

In the US, the public school districts receive from the Federal Govt x number of dollars per day for each student attending. One of the strings is that there must be a school year with a minimum of 178 days (I believe that's the number). The cold weather states generally up that to 185 or so in anticipation of school closings caused by blizzards. In some districts, like NYC, the school year is even longer due to the number of different religious holidays they grant their melting pot of cultures (Christian, Jewish, Islam, Hindu, etc.)

Now, as for Fred's comment of lengthening the school year, that has been often discussed in the US. It always crashes into one central point: where do you get the money to pay the teachers for the extra days? They won't work pro bono. Despite state and federal money, the bulk comes from local sources, particularly the property tax. In some towns the tax is maxed out; any higher and people will simply move somewhere else, generally a town close by with lower taxes. There doesn't seem to be a way to get around that.

The Scottish link on your site doesn't work for me, bedstor, but many of the others do - thanks for the link.
I'm interested in Scotland because we used to holiday in France with some friends whose children were in the Scottish system, and the kids' return to school after the summer break was so early compared to England and the British School of Paris. Schools in France broke up on 4 July and return on September the Fourth. Schools in England only broke up four days ago but return the same week. At the British School of Paris, fitting everrything in around the summer holiday period of all the various countries (some parents had childen in the English/Scottish/US/French etc. schools as well others attending the British School of Paris) was a real headache for the Board of Governors - not to mention the need to accommodate the dates for issuing exam results by the educational regimes of all those countries too.

A few years ago, when researching a trivia question, I came across the following information, from World Features Syndicate.

Country..........School Days per Year


• Japan..........243
  
• Germany........230
  
• South Korea....220
  
• Israel.........216
  
• Netherlands....200
  
• Thailand.......200
  
  
  
• United States..180
  

The list is not complete, and I have no idea if other countries require more attendance than any of the above. I also should point out that, in Illinois at least, a day is counted as a complete day if it lasts until the first lunch period. When I was in high school, the first lunch period stated at 10:30 (School started at 8.), and there were several days a year that school was let out at 11. This met the requirement for a full day, and the school got federal credit for that day. During the course of some of those days, students had to attend all the regularly-scheduled classes. Since there was a 5 minute break between classes, this made classes about 10-15 minutes long.
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School here usually starts in the last week of August or the first week of September, and ends about the last week of May or the first week of June.

Ontario Canada school days :
2005-2006 => 197
2006-2007 => 196
2007-2008 => 196
2008-2009 => 197

A minimum of 194 school days are required. Source