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?

Not= nor

One day of unauthorised absence would not be "failing to attend regularly" so wouldn't be criminal in itself.

doctrine you are falling into the trap of thinking that everyone is reasonable. the decision to authorise or not the absence is solely the head teachers. not in conjunction with the class teacher or the governors or based on a list of what is and is not acceptable. on here weeks ago someone asking for a day off to take their kids to an aunts funeral (she was the kind of granny substitute aunt lots of people have) and she was refused. the LA does not decide on the fines. if a head teacher marks you as an unauthorised absence then some LA are saying that they will fine based on the heads coding of your absence ie authorised or unauthorised. I have done lots of research on this. some LA's fine for any coded absence even half a day. some don't for the first 5 days. some its for the first 2 occasions and herein lies the problem. it isn't uniform and it isn't fair. many one day absences may not result in a fine but in my area a one day absence with previous 100% attendance will. my LA are interpreting failing to attend regularly as missing one day. others are not. Can you not see the problem with this? so your police fine anyone going at 33mph outside a school whereas mine don't fine unless its 50. and matey up the road, gets a caution for the first 3 offences then prosecuted but that's if she goes above 31. it isn't clear and it isn't concise because it is open to individual interpretation and that makes it incredibly devisive. you may be lucky and live somewhere where the odd day is tolerated. I and lots of others don't.

What mummy said.
You are wrongly informed and naive.
One day unauthorized by the school means a fine. How on earth would the LA make judgement on whether it's ok to fine the person or not wo 'knowing the family' anyway.
And naive because it's assuming that all HTs are good HT and never make mistakes etc..,
Which I am sure you know isn't the case if you have been on all the educations threads.

I amply led though by the fact that you think it's ok to fine people for a one off but repeated offenders don't?? How on eRth us that working?
Or maybe we should all start by being repeated offenders first so we don't gave any problems with the fines....

Sorry realize I misread your last post.
You are wrong. I asked my school. Even a one half day unauthorized will lead to a fine. You do need to ask even for a half day off. So you aren't allow to miss the last Friday afternoon (when they don't do a thing. We gave golden time here in particular) for example.

Sorry off topic but
missing an NHS appointment - if you cancel within 24 hours in my area without good reason more than once, you get discharged

2 times I arrived for an appointment written by the receptionist on a card only to be told they had actually forgot to put my appointment on the computer. Love to see them trying to discharge patients especially sometimes they write one appointment on the card and another on the computer.

Technically, TheDoctrineOf2014 is correct. The law states that: "If a child of compulsory school age who is a registered pupil at a school fails to attend regularly at the school, his parent is guilty of an offence."

If the legislation meant it was an offence for your child to fail to achieve 100% attendance, the legislators would have used that language. They chose not to. A child who misses one day out of a hundred has succeeded in attending regularly.

Of course, how many local bureaucrats will either:

1. know the law;
2. or care;
3. or try to apply it properly?

Many will just dish out a fine, because some memo put together by someone equally poorly informed tells them they should. And who's going to bother taking it to court and arguing the point? It'd be like arguing an unlawfully issued parking ticket - good bloody luck!

As I noted above, we're never going to agree. Ah well.

MrsBethel - its the definition of regularly. some LA's take that to be all the time, not missing a session. yes I agree they shouldn't but they are. H/T have in some areas been told by LEA's what to do. in turn LEA's are working on guidance issued by Dept For Ed. its that bit about "authorisation will not normally be given for holidays" that is causing all this. as someone upthread said h/t and schools are so shit scared of being told off by Ofsted that they are not using their discretion and going for a blanket ban so they don't have to justify themselves to them. unfortunately they have forgotten that as schools they provide a service to us the parents not to Ofsted. we should be the most important people to them not the bureaucrats. I might be that person that goes to court. I will keep MN posted.

I haven't read this whole thread (but I was very active on another recent thread with the same theme). I think that the data they use to justify this policy are NOT the right data - primarily I think it's short-term data eg on DC from very deprived backgrounds in the US; children who moved schools several times in a year or otherwise missed many weeks, etc and who weren't receiving some other educational experience instead. They weren't on holiday, they were suffering other kinds of disruption for example due to family conflict, money circumstances things that would be expected to impact their attainment anyway. CRUCIALLY: they don't factor in the loss of vacations with family; lack of attendance at weddings abroad (with maybe a loss of family links or "social capital" as a consequence), lack of opportunity to spend time with relatives including parents who have work hours that don't fit school holidays, and other things. So if perceived as just a loss, rather than a loss of some school time but a gain of other things, the picture looks negative and it looks like DC who miss school have losses in attainment. in the SHORT TERM. But that's not any justification for a policy like the one we have.

I think we should ALL write to our MPs and get this changed. If indeed there are problems with persistent truancy and if indeed it is disrupting a DC's education, then this should be dealt with. But the occasional holiday the last week of term is not going to be persistent, nor have an overall detrimental effect.

And as for teachers saying it's disruptive: several experienced teachers in Canada tell me it happens regularly and it is not particularly disruptive for them. Surely Canadians aren't that much more robust to disruption than the British...

Another approach would be for LEAs to have different weeks for the holidays, so not all 60 million British people try to fly to wherever at the same time. That would help because companies use demand-based algorithms to set prices, naturally, and when the demand peaks, so do the prices. Fewer really sharp peaks would help a TON. And yes, it'd be annoying for the few people whose DC are at different schools, but how many families have DC even in both north and south London, or certainly in both Manchester and Bristol? I'm sure there are a few. But the benefit of the many outweighs the benefit of the one... and the majority don't have long-distance schooling going on.

In our school they are following the LEA guidance. And yes this is the bit about 'taking a hols' that is causing major problem. And what do you classify as a holiday.
1 week in Tenerife or 1 week in France. One week in France for a child whose parent is French (and therefore has half if his heritage there). One week to attend a funeral in France with the opportunity to meet his wider family??? What IS a hols? Is every child entitled to one? (In France for example, they do organise trips for children in deprived areas who would otherwise never gave the opportunity to go out if their area. In that cases this hol is seen as important to the development of the child).

the reality for some of us is that the fine will virtually be computer generated. the school marks an unauthorised absence, your fine comes through the post dated 4 days ago saying pay x by x date (10 days later) or your fine will double. no right of appeal or way round it, pay or doubled. no way to call and say actually i think there's been a mistake here can you look into it rather than doubling my fine? no way to say actually the ht in question was shagging my sister and she dumped him and i believe he has done this out of spite when i had a perfectly legitimate reason to have my child out of school. nothing.

i honestly can't believe people are ok with this and believe it will all be fair and no problems.

not to mention that the persistent offenders will only pay twice??? so if you do it as a one off in an otherwise beautiful record of attendance you are fined but if it's the third time this term then not? how can you tell me that's about anything other than easy target territory?

and the idea that schools can run term time holidays in the face of this is ridiculous. joe blogs fined for having 5 days off to attend a family funeral in scotland, joe smith given 5 days off to go on an expensive skiing trip with the school

tiggy does it mean that parents who repeatedly don't take their dcs to school will be fined £60 (or £120) every single time then???

And what is the provision if the school marks a child as unauthorized absence because they think it is and the parent say (and called the school) that the child is ill? Would the parent have to pay anyway?
Who has the responsibility to prove the fact? The school to prove that the child was actually on hos/at home and well or the parent to prove that the child was ill/too unwell to go to school?

Fresh - in the main case I was involved in, parents who didn't take their child to school were prosecuted: given a suspended custodial sentence due to inability to pay fines......

The question of evidence is interesting. Certainly in the lead-up to thast prosecution, every 'illness' had to be supported with evidence from the doctoe e.g. dated note or dated prescription or verified call from doctor to school. Howeverm, there were greyer areass earlier in the process where no such documentary evidence was available, but a series of unannounced home visits from the EWO brought things quickly to a head.

But that was with the 'old' system wasn't it? How is it going to work if an unaithorized absence automatically means a fine (which I expect it would. Otherwise parents will so is learn that you don't get a fine for the first 2 and so the law won't make any difference iyswim)

I know of some cases where the parents said the child was ill for the child to come back talking about how lovely the hols in X place was. How far can you trust a child?
And the a case where a child had a D&V , mum kept the child at home for two days as asked but was told it was 'just a hols' as it was conveniently happening on a Thursday - Friday... The mum received the fine but had no note from the GP as you are told NOT to come for a D&V.

When ds was signed of by school and sent home in an illegal exclusion as 'mentally unfit to be there' for the rest of term, I was told to take him to a Dr and get a sick note to that effect for them. At the time I was reeling from what school had done, was ds ok, and didn't think, just obeyed.

Dr was furious and refused. I told school and gave them permission to contact Dr for themselves, Dr refused to take their call, school complained to me and suggested we should change Dr.

Thanks, Tiggy.

My child has been late to school a few times (problems with floods, car getting puncture, plus general lateness). If I get fined because of that, on the basis that any 10 minute lateness counts as a half day of unauthorised absence (as I have been told by the LEA) I will be extremely annoyed. Does anyone think that it would be worth arguing in court that 10 minutes missed should not be counted as half a day missed?

After such mass whining and moaning that British school holidays are too long and school days are too short because poor poor parents then have to look after their own kids nanny state is a logical consequence.

I don't believe that a few days or even a week off school really makes any difference, even if it is, heavens forbid -- a trip to Disneyland.

tiggytape
"An Act of Parliament makes taking a child on holiday in term time without permission (which can only be obtained in exceptional circumstances) against the law."

It's a subtle difference, but actually it doesn't. Section 444 is the one you want:
www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1996/56

i have had two lessons today where anyone's chance of learning was utterly destroyed by the behaviour of a few. classes where a few people consistently make it hell for everyone else and determinedly obstruct everyone.

no one is going to fine their parents or even force them to engage with their child's education at all or take any meaningful role in addressing their behaviour. yet if one of the students who actually would like to learn and get an education had been taken out of school on a trip to london visiting museums and learning and expanding their horizons today they'd be liable to be fined. fined for not coming and spending a day having their education fucked over by the same few people in their class who have been fucking it over for years.

it's a nonsense frankly.

if the government gave a toss about education they'd be addressing these parents and removing their children from mainstream education until they were able to comply with the most basic behaviour expectations without disturbing everyone else's chance of learning.

i'd rather see fines assigned to parents who raise their children to think it's ok to swear at and abuse teachers and fellow students. i would rather they were fined every time a teacher had to sit after school for half an hour filling out paperwork to justify being allowed to give that child a detention and then fine them for the time after school that staff have to sit there giving them that detention.

fining good parents for missing a little bit of school in the face of doing nothing about parents whose shit parenting results in disruption, extra work and time and the loss of teachers from the profession is farcical.

If you've got the same few children 'fucking it over' consistently and for years, I think you could look at how you're dealing with that rather than complaining that the nicer children can't go on holiday without incurring a fine.

Do you want it just to be you and the fucker-overs left?