Taking kids out of school for a term

The rules applied in the LEA I work for are: if attendance is less than 92% and you take 5 or more school days, school can request an FPN be issued, if more than 10 days are taken an FPN will automatically be issued. If more than 20 days are taken then the pupil will lose their school place. You can reapply for a place at the school on return, it’s worth checking how many places are available in your child’s year group. No term time absences are authorised in our LEA. The HT cannot authorise any term time holidays for any reason.

@Whenthechipshitthefan we took our son out for 4 months when he was 6 to travel Australia . We made sure school knew it was educational, and we had to write to the council , head teacher needing convincing so we promised a blog !!!! And he saved our space and all was well .

I am thinking somewhere really remote in the Southern Hemisphere if the weather is bad enough to be cut off during our summer months. I would go if it is your only opportunity. Maybe the school could set them some work. My grandson's school gave him a project to do when I took him to Australia, and I also arranged for him to visit a local school for a day. They wanted him to stay longer!

Yes I took my two children, aged 11 and 9 years at the time, out of school for 2 terms. They were at a private school so presumably we weren’t reported. We took them traveling around Asia, the best thing we ever did.

Do your children even want to go. Can't understand why you would disrupt thier education and lives in such a way for something they will barely remember and in your own words will never happen again. What's the point.

I hope you can do it.
Could you afford private school fees for the remainder if primary in worst case scenario?

I know two families who have had authorised absences agreed with their primary schools - one to the far east as they were planning to relocate there (they changed their minds) so school place was kept for them for agreed amount of time another to do a trip of a lifetime and they had to do a lots of agreed educational work. Hope this helps.

Just to add all the school head required was independent proof that my children were registered in a school abroad, ie this wasn’t an extended holiday. An email from the school abroad sufficed. Do it. You will never regret it.

I’ve done it for a term. The school head thought it was a great idea. My children were primarily school age. I had to pay their school fees as if they were here (some schools where I live are partly state funded partly fee paying) then their place was kept. Of course it meant paying 2 schools - and two rents- for those three months, but the cultural experience, the bilingualism and the being close to their cousins for months are worth every penny.

I took my children out of school for 3 months, and enrolled them in a school in my home country on other side of the world. They were 7&9 at that time. I had to sort out elderly parents and it wasn’t going to be possible without having them in school for that time. I took work from their school here and they had to do a diary every day etc, I didn’t get a fine when we returned, and had a letter from the school near my parents stating they had been in school for the last 12 weeks etc. they managed to return to the school here when we came back and didn’t suffer educationally because of the long time away. They still talk really fondly of that time in school when we were away and made lots of friends when they were there, and got to spend lots of time with family still and immerse themselves in a different culture. I would go for it.

They are very young still- if it’s important for you to go for a long time (1 term ) I would deregister them due to travel home ed and re registered them when you get back. They will be out of school for a long time this will probably be the best option.

Fair enough. I don’t know enough about the global situation to make that assessment. I do know that we are working as hard as we can to teach to as high a standard as possible and feel pretty proud of that. 😊

Personally, I think it would be a brilliant experience for your DC and you sound in a good position to teach them. I wish schools could give their blessing to these kind of trips which have a myriad of cultural and educational benefits in the wider sense of education.

But as PPs have said, the educational zeitgeist is concerned with absence rates and they cannot legally support an absence like this. You risk losing your DC’s place but from your posts, it sounds like it may be worth the risk of that to you. 🤷🏻‍♀️ How oversubscribed is your DC’s school? Is there a local independents school that may have an exodus of pupils who come to your DC’s school if the new government’s VAT rate is applied?

Ultimately only you can decide if the trip is worth potentially loosing your children's school places for. You know the value of the trip vs the value of their current school. Even if head says they will keep the place, if they get an application whilst you are away, the council may insist they take that child and remove 1 or both of yours from the roll, so it's up to you whether that risk is worth taking.
I strongly believe in the value of travel and of seeing extended family, and have taken our girls out for a few days to facilitate this. But their primary is fabulous and I would never in a million years risk their places to travel. You have to make the choice which is right for your family.

We did it this year with our 3. We took 6 weeks out of school, our school is an oversubscribed one too.

It was fab and I would honestly do it again !

This. Which is why there are priority rules in place to try to keep them in schools as much as possible.

In my last school we had a couple of (settled) traveller families (all related), they were lovely kids, Mums were lovely but illiterate and Dads didn’t really get involved except for end of year performances and sports day. The kids did miss a lot of school but the main reason they don’t have good educational outcomes is that not a single one of them carried on formal education after year 6. They are all “home educated” once they get to secondary age. This means the boys go to work with the male family members and the girls help the female family with the younger children. It’s the way of life for them. Genuinely lovely people but they simply don’t value formal education.
None of the children were bullied and none of the children were bullies - in fact they were better behaved than some of our other families!

Spot on

Because of the additional input required by teaching staff to bring absent children up to date with curriculum on their return

Children in the class are unlikely to all be at exactly the same stage in all subjects. I think one of the children is in reception, well some kids in reception are still in nappies and don't know how to sit still and listen to the teacher, others are reading chapter books and doing KS2 maths. Teachers cope.

I’m English and worked in HE for many years. We moved abroad when our son was 5 mainly because we don’t rate the English education system very highly compared to some other (EU) countries. 🤷🏻‍♀️

While I understand all the issues about schools and their attendance rules, I find it rather sad.

In the late 1960s my brother and I were taken out of school for six weeks to do a similar trip. My mother went to speak to the headmistress of our primary school. Her view was that we would learn far more than the school could teach us. We went with her blessing. We kept scrapbooks and wrote in them every day.

I remember so much about that trip, all the places we went and all the experiences we had. In contrast, I barely remember anything about much of school.

OP, while I think there are valid arguments for not going, I think it is very important to remember that school is not the only important thing in childhood.

I know what you mean and definitely think social media SPaG from the majority of users makes the country’s educational standards seem shockingly bad 😱but as a secondary school English teacher of more than 20 years and a bit of a stickler for SPaG, please do not think we are not trying to instil high standards. 🙏 My students write well but seem to revert to poor SPaG on social media (we have discussed this) - it’s called code switching!! 😜