Prime minister David Cameron has backed suggestions that school terms should be staggered to stop travel companies driving up prices in the holiday peaks.
He complained in particular about budget airlines hiking ticket prices because of increased demand during school holidays.
“This is very frustrating and I have seen it myself when you are booking on easyJet or Ryanair,” he said in a weekend radio interview.
“Prices go up because of the demand and then you’ve got holiday companies who sometimes seem to deliberately put up prices at holiday time.”
“Don’t necessarily do everything at the same time and I think that will help parents,” Cameron said.
His intervention came as head teachers agreed to investigate the benefits of scrapping the six-week summer holidays.
Proposals to spread holidays more evenly through the year were discussed at the National Association of Head Teachers union conference.
Leader Russell Hobby questioned whether the current 13-week term structure was healthy for staff, arguing changing it could reduce stress and cut holiday prices for families.
But head teachers wanted more evidence of the benefits of such changes.
The government gave academies and free schools in England permission to vary term-times earlier this academic year.
This is due to be extended to all state schools next September.
Support from head teachers means schools would be more likely to make changes to term-times.
The move follows education secretary Michael Gove tightening rules on parents taking their children out of schools at term-times for family holidays.
Now this is only allowed in exceptional circumstances, with many parents complaining they face high prices for holidays in peak periods.
Hobby said: “One of the things that I’m concerned about is whether the current structure of holidays is also healthy for the people who work in schools as well.
“It seems like, at the end of term, everyone is ready to drop and that actually, not reducing the amount of holiday but distributing it more evenly across the year might be one solution to that.”
He added: “However, we don’t have any particular liking for every school going its own way.
“We would like to see local or regional co-ordination, but at that point you could also have the opportunity to have a staggering of holidays around the country.
“So if different parts of the country within local authority boundaries or regional boundaries had slightly different holiday times I think that would ease the pressure on the prices of holidays as well.”
He said the change would take away some of the excuses that both parents and teachers made about missing school days.
Hobby was talking at his association’s annual conference in Birmingham, the BBC reported.