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?

freshcucumber you make an excellent suggestion. and that is precisely why it wont be adopted. because a list would be open it would be transparent and it would be fair. and you should know by now we cant have that, we cant be fair its just not right.

So could you get it authorised by the HT but get fined by county later?

I'd be livid if I asked before booking.

Wildthong there is a religious exemption built in to the rules. those kids who take off 3 or 4 weeks every year for religious reasons are still going to be able to take 3 or 4 weeks off for religious reasons. in our school its actually months, every year. what h/t when faced with a form that says we are XX religion as part of our beliefs we have to return to YY country every year for 2 months is going to turn round and say no because that would brand them a racist. I am going to become a jedi. as part of my beliefs we need 2 weeks out of school at Christmas and 2 weeks out of school in July. think I might actually put that on my form and see what happens.

retropear if it is for a holiday then you should not be able to get it authorised. the Dept for Ed website says and I quote

"....Headteachers have the discretion to grant leave, but they should only do so in exceptional circumstances. If a headteacher grants a leave request, it will be for them to determine the length of time that the child can be away from school. This leave is unlikely, however, to be granted for the purposes of a family holiday....."

mummy Jedi

I know what you mean, its just that sometimes families have other needs that the current rules don't allow for. I know a situation where the family had a double bereavement and things were just terrible for them but they were refused permission for a term time break after they missed the summer break with funerals and stuff. They went anyway and got a strongly worded letter but no fine thankfully.

WildThong I am in the same case as your dc's friend. My dcs haven't been authorized to go away for a week, even though my dcs have 100% attendance and I stated it was to see their family in my country of origin.

Apparently that wasn't enough because my DH is English and they were born in England so really what I was asking for was just a holiday [grrr]

So one school says YES, the other NO. How on earth are parents supposed to know what is OK or not OK to do? Even if you want to abide by the rules. But if you don't then you are committing a criminal offense and are supposed to pay a fine.
Sorry I really can't understand how the system is suppose top work. unless the idea is that people won't quite know that what is not OK in their school is actually OK in another so won't start protesting about it

divide and rule fresh cucumber. no strongly worded letters in our school. non authorised and you will be fined. end of. no ifs no buts no exceptions except the religious ones hence my conversion today to Jedi.

it just encourages you to lie basically. if you're honest and try to cooperate effectively with the HT they're likely to say no (for the myriad of reasons we've seen including fear of ofsted etc) and therefore you invite fines and criminalisation.

or you can just say your child was ill.

then what?

will we start having to get sicknotes for our children? will the GPs charge us for them? it is ridiculous.

when you are in a diverse community where social cohesion and tolerance is being strived for but people can see one child being allowed to go off to another country for a family gathering and celebrations because it's 'part of their religion', whilst another family of white british origin is being told no to being able to go to a funeral or wedding of family members who've emmigrated to australia of course this will cause resentment and rightly so tbh. sticking 'religious' in front of your values and desires doesn't make them any more important or credible than the next families who are humanist, atheist or other.

imagine how long it would take you to get a doctors appointment in february if the surgery was clogged up with parents getting sicknotes for children suffering from virus'.

The problem is the rules are so rigid. Schools have to act like arseholes about holidays because Ofsted will do them over for it if they take a more reasonable approach.

This is all missing the point of what public servants are supposed to do - provide a service to us, the people paying for it all, for the benefit of the child.

If our school had the choice, they'd be pragmatic and do what's best for the child, on a case-by-case basis. For young children (where school is basically colouring in half the time anyway) they'd be fine with it. As it happens, their hands are tied.

Personally, I'd lie.

Pastafarians get much better holidays than Jedi's, mummymeister.

HE told me that HE was going to reach out HIS noodly appendage to you so you could see the true way of Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.

Every Friday is a Holy Day for Pastafarians, and this is on top of "the holidays" that occur around the same time as Christmas, Easter and summer, and Pastover and Ramendan.

I think a lot of people are getting too caught up in the perceived value of school vs family time vs other educational experiences. The latter two are very important, but full time schooling from age 5-16 is a legal requirement in this country. It is up to the parents as to when/where, but as far as I can see, you either use the school system or home-school, not a combination of the two to suit family holidays.

www.gov.uk/school-attendance-absence/overview The key phrase on that link is 'full time education'. So if you take them out of school for two weeks, and aren't planning to home-school them, when/how will they make those two weeks of unauthorised absence up? I don't know if the teacher would even be obliged to provide teaching materials/info for two weeks of home-schooling, as that would be over-and-above their normal job, as they would have already taught the material in the two weeks during term time.

Incidentally, one of the ways taking your child out of school affects others is that the teacher has to dedicate time to getting them caught up, taking time away from teaching the class as a whole. If this was just a few hours of teaching to very roughly cover the topics missed in a week, then it might not affect the other 20-odd children that much - but it sounds like there are lots of parents who would take their kids out of school so that 'few hours' x however many children were off at different points in the year = a lot fewer teaching hours for the rest of the class whose parents complied with the law. So either the teacher deprives the other kids of teaching time, or leaves the holiday kid to catch up alone/with a potentially unqualified teaching assistant. Suppose the class had started a complicated topic and the teacher can't make time to take the holiday kid through the basics - how would they ever catch up?

flexi schooling is a legal option as well, but the gov it attacking that by stealth

oh stellaface really? we have to take leave outside of school holidays always. this is my job. I am self employed. I have a team of people. its the same for them. in the 10 days before Christmas my kids in senior school did nothing, nothing, of value. they did concerts, rehearsals for concerts plays entertainments etc. parents who care about their kids education like we do make sure they don't miss any work. it isn't bloody rocket science. whilst away, other kids of their own free will and for no money scan and e mail the notes from the days work. my kids read the stuff whilst away. when they come back, we print it all off, they read it again and put it in their books. they don't have to catch up because they already have. no one is deprived, no one is disadvantaged and my kids schools were all very very happy with this until Gove changed the law. most education does not take place in schools. you have them for 192 days a year for about 5 hours a day. schools have them for around 10% of the year. I do the other 90% willingly. I am not going to home school. I pay for my kids to be in school through my taxes. clearly everything in your life is black and white with no grey but that is not the case for many of us.

It makes me laugh all this talk of it's ok for the rich especially if their children are at private school.
Most 'rich' people I know whose kids are at private school can just about afford a cheap cottage in rural wales!
Generalising again

Do they drive rusty old bangers to school?

Stellaface
"I think a lot of people are getting too caught up in the perceived value of school vs family time vs other educational experiences. The latter two are very important, but full time schooling from age 5-16 is a legal requirement in this country."

The legal requirement used to be a bit more flexible and was actually a law that the majority of people agreed with.
This new one is a nonsense, all pushed through by ludicrous fines (more draconian than sentences dished out for assault!). On this issue we are no longer governed by consent, but through threat of violence by the state (fines are only paid because the state threatens to remove your liberty and destroy your life if you do not cough up).

Just because it is now that law, that doesn't mean it's right. Was such an idea 'wrong' before and all of sudden it's now 'right'?

Expensive private schools are full of parents who make every possible sacrifice to send their children there. I feel humbled, especially as they are paying tax from their very hard earned income to support my DC at state school. I don't begrudge them their massive SUV or 5 bed rural idyll at all - they deserve it. And their children are miles better than mine too.

Winter if they can afford private fees they are rich.Anybody with a spare 10,20,30, 40k or more a year is rich.

They can also take cheaper holidays.

MrsBethel - although I don't in general agree with those who take their child on school time holiday I agree with you that this is yet another example of the Tory government using draconian methods to stamp down on what probably wasn't that big a problem in the first place. This country is rapidly becoming a really nasty place to live for those who are not rich.

at the point where your child may be in a class with a child who hits other children, disrupts learning for everyone every lesson, who has no education special needs but just comes from a home where no discipline, attention or preparation has been done, etc and that child's parents are totally unaccountable and you have no recourse for complaining that your child is not receiving a decent education you can be crimninalised for going on holiday for a few days before the end of term.

does that really seem sane?

i have taught classes where every single lesson involved time wasting disruption from a child who was intent on being abusive, non compliant and a total obstruction to learning. the parents of the other 29 children in that class had no recourse to remedy the detrimental effect upon their child's education whatsoever. yet if they took their child out of school for a few days they can be fined and criminalised.

you have to think of this bigger picture wise. there are kids being barely socialised, barely fed, barely parented in this country with no action being taken whatsoever. how in that context (and within that context every child's education is being affected) is criminalising responsible parents who do socialise and educate their children but want to take them out of school a few days a year sensible? it is the usual story of an easy target. don't tackle the real problems, tackle instead the easy target whose likely to comply with the sanction (paying money).

i think some people could do with spending time in a struggling secondary school and seeing how much a good, well behaved child is up against in terms of getting an education and then judge whether a few days off in another culture with attentive adults adds more to their lives than being sat in school.

their children are miles better than yours drom???? are you for fucking real?

is it their parents income that makes them intrinsically better than your kids?

jesus.

I think Dromedary was being a little sarcastic there, Numpty

So now, as a teacher, your argument is that schools are so shit that most kids would be better off on holiday? Bloody hell.

sorry dromedary! not paying enough attention!

no original, as per many other points in this discussion, my argument is not a black and white blanket statement but pointing to specifics, individual situations, variations and context. i stand by that. i believe in specifics, context and individual merit over generalisations and hyperbole any day.

but yes a significant proportion of secondary school children's potential learning time is frittered away dealing with rudimentary behavioural issues and conflict. for many secondary school pupils a significant amount of their learning time is spent being trapped watching that conflict and time wasting take place and being powerless to influence it or get on with their learning. a significant amount of their learning time is spent trying to negotiate being in pokey, overcrowded classrooms without enough resources.

this unfortunately is fact.