AIBU to tell you it is not illegal to take your child out of school to go on holiday

[Pseudonym99]

www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-34543101

[LittleRedSparke]

"Until a time when it becomes affordable to take kids away in school holidays (places that add £1k to their prices are just robbing bastards), then most people would consider it"

This is simply supply and demand - schools should be able to move their term dates around though

You dont have children forever, and its not a right to go on holiday, so you either pay up or go somewhere else, or do something different.
Saying that, I am in the the head should be allowed to authorise it camp though.


"the story in the OP is about a 6 year old missing a week of school and the rest of her attendance had been fine."
His daughter had a 93.8% attendance rate the previous academic year. Is that considered fine these days?

[teacherwith2kids]

I feel that schools should authorise genuine 'needs' - to get better when ill, to attend the funeral of a close and beloved relative, to attend medical appointments that cannot be scheduled outside the school day, to see a parent in the forces on a rare leave, even to be away from the immediate 10 mile radius once in their primary-aged lifetime.

I don't think that they should authorise 'wants'. I also think that some absences are a mixture, in which case specific paerts could be coded differently: authorised for the daty of the funeral and necessary travelling time, not authorised for extra days surrounding that.

And no non-curriculum, school trips in school time - in my DC's school, things like ski-ing, expeditions etc are all during the holidays, and there is a single week at the end of the summer holidays when all sports / muisic etc trips are scheduled at the same time.

[caitlinohara]

echt - don't you rather think that it's the system that pays teachers based on attainment targets that should be changed?

[Lweji]

What if holidays abroad or elsewhere are that expensive?
I don't go on them.
Most of my travelling was done after I was in school and before children. Often within work.
It's not a right of children to have holidays abroad, fgs

[Lweji]

Children do have a right to education, though, and parents have the responsibility to provide them with it.

Holidays in cheaper places or even at home are just as good for family time.

[LittleRedSparke]

OP not coming back to comment? just a link, to an outside story....

[PacificMouse]

Lweji no they don't. That sort of trip is never compulsory and a lot of children don't go because it's too expensive.
On the top of that, it's not the only 'outing' organised by the school so very clearly very few children do all of the trips organised by the school that year.

If the idea is that they don't loose out because so many of them are going together, then that means that the ones staying are actually loosing time to learn.

Besides, the whole idea of attendance is that you need the whole time at school to be learning so there is no reason why suddenly it's OK for the children to be missing one or two weeks for a trip with the school.

Except if you consider that going away skiing is something they would never do with their own family therefore it's an opportunity, learning isn't all about academic stuff blabla. But that can be said about hols with family too.

[Lweji]

I didn't know they were going only with some children and during school time. If that's the case I'd complain to the school. Although if it's a scheduled trip, then I'd expect the teachers to be revising then.
But I certainly wouldn't use something like that to justify taking one child away on holiday without making provision for them to catch up with work myself.

[bozeydugger]

If working parents are unable to take their holidays to coincide with school holidays should that family do without a family holiday perhaps for several years?

[PacificMouse]

techer agree with you again. These trips should NOY be during term time.

However at my secondary, they are and there several of them (skiing, 'language trips' to France to name a few).

The worst bit for me is that thes etrips are actually more expensive that what I could organise myself to do something similar

[teacherwith2kids]

Pacific, I don't think there is any excuse for things like school ski-ing to be in school time, tbh. DCs' school does dry ski-ing in the evenings, which can be separate from or linked to the main ski-ing trip, which is in a holiday. MFL language trips etc, all the same principle - in holidays or in the sngle 'off timetable' week at the end of the summer term, when work experience etc also takes place.

[Lweji]

The worst bit for me is that thes etrips are actually more expensive that what I could organise myself to do something similar
Probably because you're paying for the teachers to "chaperone". :)

[PacificMouse]

Yep but when it's 2 or 3 times the price, I'd rather take them myself! when they are going away anyway

I know a parent who went to see the school to take their dcs out of school skiing, on the week where the school was organising a skiing trip.
I'm curious to know what was the outcome but I suspect the answer was NO to protect said attendance levels.

[SantasLittleMonkeyButler]

I do think that HT's should still have the same powers to authorise holidays (or not) as they used to. In theory, they can still authorise for "exceptional circumstances" but our LEA has dictated that a holiday will almost never fall into this category. Therefore the HT has to decline the vast majority of requests.

From a personal point of view however, I will freely admit that my opinion on this has completely changed over the years. I have a large age gap (14 years) between DC1 & DC3 - and 10 years between DC2 & DC3. When DC1 & DC2 were at primary school we did, on occasions, take them out of school for holidays. Not weeks at a time, but certainly for a few days here and there. Both DCs were the type of children to come out of school and tell me they had done "nothing" during the day. We would have daily conversations along the lines of;

Me: Have you had a good day?

DC: Yeah.

Me: What have you done today?

DC: Nothing.

Me: You must have done something! What lessons did you have?

DC: Don't know.

With hindsight (and this may make me sound stupid), I can see that this clouded my opinion of how valuable those 3 or 4 missed school days were to the DCs education. I used to think that they would learn more and get more value out of a holiday as they "weren't doing much in school anyway".

Now, with DC3 at school I have totally changed my views on it. DC3 comes out of school every day full to bursting with every little detail of everything she has done, learnt & seen that day. She is truly like a little sponge and, quite honestly, learns something new every day. I can now see (because DC3 is telling me!) how the English or maths they do one week leads on to the English or maths they do the next week. And probably links in to something else too (history, assembly etc.) Therefore, I now think that taking her out for a week during term time would make her miss so much that I won't be considering it.

Also, now that DC3 is telling us all everything she has done in great detail, her older brothers will say "yes, I remember doing that" etc. etc. So, they were doing these things - just not talking about it!

[teacherwith2kids]

Boxey, genuine question: how common would you say it is for working parents to have no single week of holiday during any of the school holidays, including none of the half terms?

I can absolutely see that it is not ideal to have the main family holiday in the February half term (though that would have been relatively normal in my old school due to its relative cheapness), because that's the only week that the parents can get. However, the choice is not always as stark as holiday / no holiday - there may well be a 'less ideal but still feasible' alternative of 'shorter holiday at a less than ideal time of year'.

There are parents - e.g. serving forces families - where getting holiday at specific times is genuinely impossible, and the existing guidelines already allow schools to authorise term time breaks in such circumstances.

[Sirzy]

Teacher from what I have read of your posts then I agree with you.

Ds is currently off school for 2 weeks, he is recuperating from an operation and although he is probably well enough to be in me and the head both agreed that it was better, and safer, for him to stay home so he could heal properly. We also took his additional needs into consideration when making that decision. Work has been sent home and we are doing it all (and more)

That doesn't mean that taking a 2 week holiday would be fine. Nor does it mean either that - as is seemingly the case in this article - he should have less right to a holiday than a child who hasn't been ill/injured and therefore at that point has better attendance.

[Lweji]

Me: What have you done today?

DC: Nothing.

You actually believed that???

[Drew64]

I can certainly understand the schools position on this issue.
Teachers have a hard enough job as it is what with marking, lesson plans etc, etc but then this is all wasted when we take out children out of school for up to two weeks so we can go on holiday.
Our children then go back to school and the class is disrupted because our children have to catch up. It's a bit unfair to ask the rest of the class to go over the same subject matter again. It's both wasteful and disruptive.

I'm also sure that some schools are too interested in scoring and points too and when we take out children out of school this makes their un authorised absence rates look worse than they should. This effects their OFSTEAD rating and potentially their ability to attract more children to their school.

Where ever possible I avoid taking our children out of school during term time as I believe it is important to support the teachers in ensuring that my children are at school on time to learn what the teachers have planned for them to learn in what is really a shot academic year.
We've only done it once and we have one in Yr 11 and 1 in Yr 9

What I will say though is that there was no need for the government to get involved with this.
They know nothing of the schools let alone the teachers, children and parents.
Authorised absence should be allowed, it should be allowed by the head of the school taking everything into consideration.
The BBC link talks about children going on what looks like the holiday of a lifetime with a big family group and only one instance of this. As far as I'm concerned the head of the schools should have been able to authorise this.

Sure, there are those that will try to take the piss out of the system and the head of a school is the best person to decide if this is the case, not the government.

[teacherwith2kids]

Drew, in many ways, if all parents accorded headteachers respect and accepted their decisions, there would have been no need to involve the government.

However, having more than once witnessed significant intimidation (verbal and implied physical) of a head who had refused, on completely reasonable grounds, to authorise holiday, having the backup of government had sadly become necessary.

[caitlinohara]

teacher As others have said, in some workplaces where there are many people with children, there is a proper scrum to book school holiday weeks off and not everyone's wishes can be accommodated. In addition to forces families, there are thousands of shift and factory workers who have to take holiday at specific times. So it's probably a lot more common than you think.

[teacherwith2kids]

Many heads had simply taken the 'path of least resistance' and authorised up to the maximum of 10 days per pupil, whatever the circumstances, because it had become too difficult (and personally, if not dangerous, certainly very unpleasant) not to authorise.

[caitlinohara]

Incidentally, BOTH my parents were teachers, so we had no choice about when we took our holidays and mostly did cheap camping trips. But we DID have a lot of family time together, which I never fully realised the value of until I compare it to the situation many of my friends are in today where they desperately try to arrange one overlapping week of holiday with their husbands so that the family can maybe do a few day trips because they can't afford to go away anywhere.

[teacherwith2kids]

Caitlin, I genuinely don't know how common it is, which is why I was asking.

Say in a workplace of 520 people, of whom, for maths' sake, half had school-age children. Each has 4 weeks of leave, so on average 20 people can take holiday in any given week. There are, give or take, 14 weeks of holiday in a school year. So mathematically, 280 people can take a week of leave during 1 of the school holidays - which is more than the number of parents in this theoretical case.

Obviously taking holiday in fortnight chunks upsets this model, as do families where both parents work in the same company, and there will be workplaces where a very large proportion of employees are parents. However as a proportion of the parents of school age children, the proportion who mathematically CANNOT take a week of holiday during ANY of the 14 weeks must be quite small - would you say 1%? Or fewer?

[caitlinohara]

teacher that's the way it used to be - 10 days' parental leave per school year, and it worked fine, but I accept that teaching nowadays is not the same profession it used to be, what with targets and league tables and performance related pay etc etc. I think a lot of the changes have been positive but I also think at times we have lost sight of what's important and you get the odd case like this one where common sense seems to have gone out of the window.

[feckitall]

I'm just amazed at all the literate mners arguing about it on here...afterall, I bet most of us were taken out of school for holidays as children...

Although to be fair we didn't take our DC out ourselves and only ever had a handful of cold and damp camping holidays in the UK, we couldn't afford most years, a holiday anywhere!