The Tonga governments schools will close for two weeks starting today July 26 as over 1400 teachers join a national strike of civil servants.

After two days of uncertainty, the Government 's 115 primary schools and eight of its Secondary schools are taking their August holidays early.

Of Tonga's 1,600 Government teachers over 1,000 are based in Tongatapu. On the first day of the strike, Friday July 22, the Ministry of Education recorded that throughout Tonga only 114 Secondary school teachers turned up at work with 134 working on Monday July 25.

The Director of Education, Viliami Takau, said that they decided on the early school-break because in the last two days of the strike students had lost a lot of their classroom time. They were hopeful that when school reopened on August 9 for its final term the strike would be resolved.

"At this stage this is the best we can do since the strike badly affected Tonga College and Tonga High School as well as some other primary schools in Nuku'alofa due to absentee teachers," Viliami said today.

On Tongatapu only 33 primary school teachers were at school on July 22 and 41 were working yesterday.

Viliami said that this year Government schools planned their two weeks holiday break from August 19 ...– September 4. By bringing the holidays forward it means that Term 3 will be longer for all of the schools but it would not disrupt this year...’s Christmas break in mid December, he said.