AIBU to think laws that fine and jail parents for school absence, outside term time holidays, are ridiculous?

For a specific cohort parents who cba getting kids to school it should be deducted from benefits.
Not every child not attending has a genuine issue. And not every genuine issue should result in lack of attendance.
Yes it is difficult to distinguish between the two sometimes but schools are well placed to assess a situation.

I think it goes to the local authority doesn't it?

How would you distinguish between the two without actually being present in the home or knowing if the school were genuinely supportive of SEND or just paying lip service?

Personally I think it’s a joke! Where does the money go? Doesn’t go back into schools and the education department.

It was better in the days when parents could consult with school and have approval because it made it easier for families who will go away anyway to go at less disruptive times (e.g. assessment weeks, field trips). With it being a blanket no, there's no point in having a dialogue about it and families go away anyway.

When DS had a difficult run of health issues including an on-going chronic condition, post-injury complications and emergency surgery for something else, the blunt focus on attendance just increased the stress, and we'd get to a point where he'd be unauthorised for vomiting because I hadn't taken him to the GP about it. DS has never been out of school for an illicit reason and it does create resentment that ill health is then wrongly presented as doing something "unauthorised" on records.

I know school is the middle man of shitty government policy, but the school is who you have the relationship with, and it's hard to maintain a positive relationship with people sending you shitty letters and an already difficult time that you have little control over.

It's not concern over attendance that I have issue with, it's the tone of it, and inaccurate record keeping.

Fines don’t help and they are often not collected as the non attending children have health or mental health issues.
it’s a pointless punishment that is rarely collected.

Do the fines actually help?

Its a tiny price compared to hoildays.
Childten who dont want to be in school still cant be dragged into school
Long term illness wont suddenly get better

The only group it may help would be youngerPrimary where the parents struggle to get theur child to school.

I think society has had enough of people who produce lots of children and don’t parent them. Like those boys driving the wrong way up motorways.
Education is important & parents need to be held accountable. If you have a free state education out in a third world country they’d attend. We’re too used to feckless behaviour.

Rubbish! You can still value your child’s education and have a term time holiday. I’d rather parents read with their children regularly, be present in their learning and education and take them on a term time holiday annually.

Than a child have 100% attendance and the parents not listening to them read or care about their education.

The evidence of attendance isnt about holidays it is just about attendance! I missed 6 weeks on my education due to having an external pins in my arm, did it affect my education , no! Plus a term time 2 week holidays each year.

I’ll go against the grain and say term time holidays shouldn’t be fined unless a family take the absolute piss and drag their DC out of school for 2-3 weeks. Most parents dodge the fining system by going 2-3 days before their kids break up or after they’ve gone back anyway. Who can even afford to go during the holidays? It’s extortionate.

It’s just a data point for government and ofsted to beat schools with when they inspect them. It’s not about the children or their education.

It is ruining the relationship between school staff and parents, which then leads to worst learning and personal outcomes for children.

The fines were meant for persistent truants not families going on holiday. It has become an easy money making scheme for the government and that is it.

And I work in education.

I’ve definitely had conversations with y11 boys who are still turning up despite being extremely disengaged with school, who in years gone by would have stopped attending probably by Feb Y11. They’ve told me they’re still attending ‘because you have to, right, or your mum goes to jail’.

So it works for some.

It did have a huge impact on term time holidays for a bit, then some started calculating that the fine was less than the saving so it was still worth it. Term time holidays are creeping back up again but at my school are still less than they were.

I’ve seen a few posts online of kids getting their GCSE results and bombing them and the parents ( actually it was all mothers) are almost amused by it. It would be really interesting to know what’s going on in those households to see if there’s a common denominator.

I think you're making too big a deal of it tbh. Attendance at school is very important so there should be some disincentive for absence, else everybody will say 'Yes but it's OK for me to take my kids out for our fortnight in Malaga culturally enriching travel experience, it's the oiks they should be targeting'. It is a blunt instrument but what else is supposed to happen? Yes you can have a more social-workery type system like some Asian countries do, but a) nobody wants to pay for it, and b) the people that moan about fines would moan about that too.

We have the same in Australia and to make sure you pay it's deducted from your benefits

The escalation process is intended to target those who persistently take their children out. Hence the parenting order / risk of prosecution at 3rd offence.

It’s not a flat fine for every absence without escalation.

You are being unreasonable, it is a good law.
Decades of repeatable and valid research shows that children whose parents prioritise education have better educational outcomes than those who don't.

You don't want to discuss term-time holidays but it is obvious that because the majority of families do value education and won't choose those weeks, therefore demand is lower and prices are cheaper.
Irresponsible, neglectful parents who don't value education do choose those weeks, and their children's educational outcomes suffer in a measurable demonstrable way that damages them long-term.

The parents who would rather have the cheap holidays do not care about the evidence, and do not care that their decisions are harming their children. The only thing the law can do is impose fines that should be big enough to exceed the difference between the price of a termtime holiday vs the price of the same holiday in actual holiday time. The fines are not big enough.

Imprisonment is rare and only happens if a parent is so pig-headed about being above the law that such drastic action is a positive benefit to the children.

The new national framework I presume the OP is referring to was introduced in August 2024.

There are many reasons why parents take children out of school and some are entirely reasonable: a child who is not suited to the system and is miserable, illness, funeral of family member etc. I would also include holidays as these are life-enhancing and may only be affordable for some in term time.

Those families who regularly fail to get their children ready on time for school or to bother to get them there are the minority and often poor and have had bad school experiences themselves - they need help and support for their problems not financial punishment which they cannot pay and then find themselves on the wrong side of the law.

The key is to ask why the children are not in school and to address those reasons. Doing this costs money - easier to slap on a fine and criminalize already disadvantaged parents.

I'm a teacher.

I also think it's terrible. It doesn't actually stop parents from booking term time holidays either - they just factor the potential fine into the holiday cost (and its still cheaper than a holiday in the school holidays). It just causes a lot of worry and frustration.

However, I do understand the concerns around school attendance because it can indicate/hide safeguarding concerns (eg waiting for bruises to heal, risk of child disclosing immediately after an incident, hiding children from professional eyes generally).

However, that's not the same as a week off for a holiday and the pattern of absence is different.

However, a child in my class last year took 5 weeks off throughout the year for holidays. That's excessive.

We need longer holidays in this country, that way it would be less condensed into a very short, busy, expensive time so parents would have more choices. I also think that children's mental health and wellbeing would be improved. I've never understood why this country has such limited holidays.

School attendance is a huge issue for a minority of children. Over the years I have been teaching, of the parents who have been fined, their children have had attendances as low as 30%. There are families who are serial term-time holiday-goers too. Families whose children always seem to be ill on a Friday and a Monday, whose children only see their fathers for 2 weeks in September so have to go on holiday then (after holidaying with mum at the end of June), families whose children regularly take extended 6 week holidays back to the parent’s home country for their second cousins wedding, parents who just cannot be arsed sending their children to school.
These are children who absolutely are missing out on education. What do you suggest happens to their parents?

The “attendance crisis “ has been triggered by a lot of things including covid and the lack of support for SEN ( inclusion costs more than special schools and hiding such kids away ) and the rise of the “self made man” - the arrogant ignore all the experts I know better thought pattern - who is despising of education - education which has been belittled and run down by years of Tory rule

It's a lazy way of trying to prevent neglect and abuse.

Taking your own child on holiday for 2 weeks is not abuse nor neglect. It should be a parents right to decide.

But because none of our services are funded properly because the men running our government are pilfering as much of our tax as they can for them and their greedy rich mates. Schools are underfunded so teachers are over worked and under paid. Same for social services. So rather than fixing that and making sure schools are able to teach kids with some flexibility. And social services are able to actually do something abuse actually abused and neglected children. They make it easier for the services to manage on less by burdening, as usual, the people with less money.

@SummerHols2026 the issue is it doesn’t target persistent offenders. It does target otherwise good parents who take their child on holiday.

I say this as a parent that hasn’t been fined (but maybe next year) and as someone who works with those persistent offenders.