Opinion please! School absence due to parent working abroad

You don't have to take them, you are choosing to take the. If you think it's the right thing to do then just pay the fine.

Find what is on the curriculum over that 2 weeks. Though I suspect teachers won't be happy going to lots of work to provide you with stuff but I would think for much of it you could teach DD yourself..

What people seem to miss is that what is missed at school is NEVER taught again and if it is some vital maths understanding or start of some new work then DD will not have that ever. So do what is necessary to make sure she covers the work and take her and have a great time.

OP ask your company to pay the fine.

We took dd1 out (y2) for 11 school days because I wanted to go home for Christmas and I wasn't going all that way without staying a decent time.

I would never let a school dictate to me what's best for my dc.

We didn't get fined either although it was unauthorised.

@TheGreenEye

£120 for the entire absence, not per day.

Yes, the cost of your wife and children's flights/accommodation if work are paying is a taxable benefit on you. Your employer should be informing HMRC - depending on your tax rate, the cost to you would either be 20% or 40% of the amounts paid by your employer.

Have you ever travelled with work before? Time socialising with family didnt really fit into the schedule. I was either at work, working in the hotel room to keep everything at my home office ticking over, eating (often with work colleagues) or sleeping. Not sure where doing nice things with my family would fit in.....

Have a fab time in Aus, pay the fine if you get one, and work with some professionals about your anxiety. It is not a normal response to take your family with you on a work trip - and even more exceptional for work to pay.

If your firm is paying for your family’s tickets, I hope you remember to inform the Inland Revenue. Although I’m sure that the exceptional nature of this trip means that you should be exempt from tax.

Australia for two weeks?

That means at least two days either end of travel, plus another two-three days of jet lag when you arrive. But you'll be swanning off to work leaving your wife to deal with exhausted, grumpy children so why should you care about that, right?

Taking children out of school because the whole family need to accompany you on a work trip for the sake of your mental health, is about you and your needs and not really about the children's needs at all. That's what's inappropriate here.

It is exceptional for the employee to feel the need to do this but it's not to do with an exceptional need that the children have. Can you see the difference?

What a crazy thread.

Hello from Australia! I don't understand why you get finned, it seems crazy. Enjoy the trip!

sp-thinking

I think both IMOGEN and Soaring Swallow have good perspective here. OP, you sound a bit of a nightmare to me. You're asking for opinions, nobody is forcing you to agree or accept them. Yet you reply back to every individual who doesn't agree with you, telling them where they are wrong or haven't understood quite how free-thinkung and special you and your family are. I feel sorry for your children, they are being used here. They should not be your MH support. If you are not well enough to travel for work alone, you are not well enough to go. The HT is right to protect their interests by registering the attendance as unauthorised.

You prefaced all this by saying that part of the reason for bringing the family, kids included, is to avoid you having mental health problems when you're away for an exceptional work trip. You've had your work write that it's not a holiday.

Ok. It's not a holiday then.

So is this exceptional trip actually about your children being a kind of security blanket? I've had serious mental health problems too and understand them importance of family, kids and support. But removing them from school to do this, regardless of the location, is wrong. Even if it's only part of the reason. You need to be healthy and it sounds like you must have done a lot of work to get where you are now. That I can most certainly applaud. If you can't go away without your wife and kids though, you shouldn't be going.

You probably won’t get fined, not everyone does.

It’s rather pot luck who does/doesn’t. Not based on the principle of the rule, just on the chasing up of the consequence. You’ve accepted you may well be fined though, so cross that bridge when it comes. I imagine that thinking might help in all aspects of your mental health, you seem quite deeply to be ‘in your head’ in a circular way.

Frankie says relax.

It doesn't matter if we agree with you - it's the school's decision, not ours. Schools are under immense pressure to keep attendance rates up, so they don't have much freedom to interpret the rules as they want.

The govt says the school should fine you. The LEA will say the school should fine you. The school is extremely likely to fine you.

Blame the govt/the LEA or whoever you want, but this isn't the kind of unexpected, unavoidable exception to the rule that schools would allow. As much as this is a new experience for you, it's not such an amazingly rare occurrence to make this 'exceptional'. There will be many children at the school who have parents that work away, and they will all be expected to turn up to school as normal.

'Exceptional circumstance' generally get interpreted as a very close family member's funeral far away, or them being close to death. Even a parent's wedding often isn't allowed. Trying to convince us here will make no difference, and no amount of paperwork will make a difference either.

fwiw - I don't agree with the rule, but I have no power to change it.

@thegreeneye is this not asking for advice??? “We've sent a letter from my employers confirming this is work, not pleasure. Is there any other evidence I should be presenting to the school?”

So you didn't really want opinions OP, you just wanted validation. Why ask for opinions then?

@TheGreenEye just that you’ll ignore those opinions and do what you feel is best for you, regardless of any issues to your family. Like I said, why bother posting when you don’t want advice?

It's not exceptional. People go on OS holidays all the time. Maybe you don't, but the fact that you don't doesn't make it exceptional.
I love that you feel the kids will be experiencing a different culture. Unless you're heading outback, we're pretty much the same as you. As for climate, it's hot this week, but in two weeks or so it's probably going to be milder and you would have experienced mid-high 20s in the UK. Nothing exceptional.