School Abscense Fine - huge amount

[PMDD]

If I am correct, if you take your child/ren out of school without prior agreement, there is an automatic fine of £60/day/child/parent?

So for us, a family with 3 children, a 2 week holiday in (say) June, would cost us £3600 - or double that if we don't pay within a certain amount of time!

Is it me to think that is totally unreasonable?!

That is a huge amount. The people who take their children out normally can't afford the hike in holiday prices, so how on earth would they afford the fine?

Different countries maybe?

Its a skiing holiday so children are learning a sport

No fines in NI either.

Still the UK, or Great Britain.

The other issue is low attendance. In that case a child who happens to be ill quite about one year, as my niece was 2 years ago, could easily be getting into trouble because she had been away from school 3 times for a week at a time. How will you be able to tell if a child was actually or on hols? Some threads on here are already showing that some schools are coming out all guns blazing and telling people that they will have to pay a fine as it is clearly not a real illness.
Or the ones that tell parents they need to see a prof before they allow the child out of the school for a few hours for doctor/SALT etc appointment.

The role of the school is NOT to have a police role but to educate children. Unfortunately giving that sort of power to anybody can also lead to abuse if the system..,, the other way around.

It isn't just about the fine. it is about it being a criminal offence. my DD is in year 9 several kids in her class are having 4 separate weeks out during term time through the school - 1 week in France, 1 week in Spain, 1 week skiing and 1 week outward bound but I cannot have 5 days out at the end of term without a fine. and why are these kids going on these 4 holidays in term time organised by the school? because they can afford it. why doesn't the "missed work that cant be caught up" or "take them out in school hols" apply to this. Oh yes that's right because it suits the school to do it in term time.

I actually had a teaching student once whom I had taught in my nqt year. I remembered her well as she didn't start until October as she was in Florida with family for a month long trip if a lifetime (this was y5 so she must have been 10)

HT told me they took the first two wks every year as it fitted in better with her father's job. But this year they went for 4wks. Anyway, she talked fondly if that trip as an adult and she had obviously done very well educationally as had attended an excellent uni and was doing a pgce back locally. I think he'd experience probably cemented my views on it all. I doubt very much if the boy who was rarely in school and who was in regular but ineffectual contact with the EWO did anywhere near as well. (Hope I am wrong if course)

I agree that absence from school for holidays needs to be clamped down upon. I also think that school trips should not allowed in term time unless they are very specifically linked to course work and the curriculum, are cheap and accessible.

Yet the government are doing nothing effective to target the real problem.
Why not come out and tell parents who don't bother sending their kids once a week/fortnight and are late most other days that they are feckless and irresponsible? They get reported to EWO and they are visited and given gentle coaxing and incentives etc but there's no heavy handedness as the EWOs I've spoken to say there's no point as it would just be ignored.

There are lots of problems with schools.

Communicating clearly on the basics that should apply to everyone - school is obligatory and children must attend every day unless they are ill - is a good start.

its only been in recent years this obsession with taking children on holiday in school time. I'm not that ancient (37) and remember one child going on holiday in school time it was not normal thing to do and everyone went on holiday in the school holidays

As a few other people have already said, this is my recollection as well.

However, I would say that it is not just recently that prices have shot up - they've always been like that. Growing up I certainly never had a holiday abroad and my parents wouldn't even have considered taking us out of school.

Holidays for us were a week at Butlins. The first time I ever had a holiday abroad was after A levels when we drove to northern France and spent two weeks in a little gite.

People take far more holidays these days than they did in the past, hence the issues surrounding availability. We live in the era of mass tourism...

On the one hand parents want cheap wrap around care and holiday care so they can work and on the other they want to be able to take their DC out of school when it suits their place of work/budget to go on holiday.

Bonsoir, that's all well and good but the parents I'm referring to font really care about the overall ethos of school. It's like the elephant in the room. Everyone knows this is the biggest cause of low attendance and poor attainment yet it's expensive and politically sensitive to tackle so we place an outright ban on holidays to try and claw back a little in the attendance stakes. Just so government can say how much they've managed improve attendance figures.

I think talking about holidays abroad confuses the issue. Many parents taken children out during term time are staying in the uk.

At our school it is acceptable for the school to be closed and not providing my children an education because the school is used as a polling station. This happens most years for a day in may. I have decided to take my children out of school for the other four days that week to go away. If its ok for them to shut the school without a good reason (I don't class polling as a good reason, they should provide somewhere else for that purpose) it's ok for me to remove my children from school for a holiday. And even if they fine me I have still saved more from lower prices in term time than going in school holidays.

well put worried. so here we have a problem - feckless and irresponsible parents keeping their kids off one day a week/turning up late - and the solution is to stop everyone having time off in school term time even if their job means that they have no option. and the feckless parents? oh yes that's right they are just carrying on but overall the figures look better on attendance so it must have worked mustn't it. Why aren't EWO taking a tougher line. why do we tiptoe around these issues. missing 1 day a week or a couple of lessons a week will have a huge impact on learning. missing 2 or 3 days in July wont have anything like the same impact. not sledgehammer and nut but manipulation of the facts.

Lucylouby - it isn't about the fine its about it being an offence. you will be made a criminal for doing this. if it were just the fine I would still be cross but this makes me furious that it is an offence.

It's really insulting that capitalism is otherwise so generally unregulated - let the market decide - and there are so many cases where regulation is genuinely needed and strongly resisted, like:

decent minimum wage
housing costs and obligations upon landlords
privatisation and contracting out of every fucking thing in sight
etc etc etc

And yet this is a massive glaring exception. So incredibly insulting.

It's not just about tourism. we live in an increasingly globalised world with friends and family all over the place (as decreed by the free market of course, most people have moved for economic reasons if they are far from their place of origin), so to attend a wedding on a Saturday might require time off school if it is in another country. It is bizarre and unreasonable that making decisions like this is no longer considered to be within the parents' control, and as pointed out upthread, the penalty will hit some much harder than others.

My dS is in first grade in the states. They seem to have a sensible attitude to this. There are so many days required attendance to enable the child to pass the grade, if they don't attend they don't progress. I can't remember the amount, but say it's 80% attendance, leaving it at parental discretion if they take dc out for holidays or save them in case of medical issues.

If they're late to school 5 times, they get an absence, and I think 5 absences, ie unexplained, triggers investigations.

As an aside, the posters saying refund taxpayers who fund the schools, if your child is out of school on vacation, parents are taxpayers!! On the whole, so that seems a non issue.

I think the government needs to stop babying people and being so rigid, set parameters where they can manage their child's attendance within reason to suit the family. We all have different things going on in our lives, a cookie cutter approach doesn't work for all.

wallison - thank you SO much.

coldlight i assure my child does not need additional support from primary school teachers because i have a mental health condition and i don't like your implication that he will do because somehow if mother's teeter on the edge of depression their children will ultimately need the likes of a primary school teacher to support

many people have mental health conditions and do not allow them to impact on their children or get to the stage of being likely to. some of them may do that by taking a few days off of the end of the term to get away for a much needed holiday that they know will do the world of good. it doesn't mean you need to have the social workers on stand by.

and you are another demonstrating why i would not go and tell the school about my private business.

in reality it is me who has had to give my son tonnes of extra support some years and make an effort to put even more than usual into educating him because he's been lumbered with such a poor teacher.

Numpty, as a (presumably currently employed) teacher; why did you need tiggy to explain to you how SAT's work?