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

Also yes mummy would you expect time off at Christmas? If so then that's pretty hypocritical.

On the ski-ing vs religiojn front:

• the dates of religious festivals are usually fixed (or fixed according to a lunar calendar), and cannot be 'moved' to the nearest convenient school holiday.
• Ski-ing is possible in the Chrisrtmas holiday, February half term, and in some places at Easter.

So one cannot be managed within the usual structure of holidays, whereas ski-ing can. You might WANT to go ski-ing out of peak holiday season, but you don't NEED to

strawberry. The entire state education system is founded on the free schools that the Church Introduced. Christians gets a "free pass" because the country, and the education system, is founded on Christianity.

You may not like it, but thats the way it is. Just like the sky is blue and the grass is green. You can't change history.

Oddly, Mummy, I worked up to 12 hours on every Sunday of term time when i was full time, on planning, marking and preparation. I don't any more, as i am full time.

part time, that should have read.

mummy 'time with your family' is pretty vague - what does this consist of? I do think that religious observance is more important than 2 weeks in Florida, but as important as (say) going to one parent's home country where they will speak that language and be in touch with their cultural ties. It depends what 'time with your family' consists of.

Your job is a choice - you chose to be self-employed. So why should schools work around that, going by your logic?

hopeful I answered your question. I don't expect Christmas off because as a self employed person I have to work when I have to work.

following a religion, being part of a culture and taking on its ways is a choice. you aren't forced to do it. you can not do it.

sorry teacherwith2kids I forgot the mumsnet mantra there for a minute. teaching is the hardest job in the world. apologies, ignorant of me to forget this.

HopefulAnxiety now who is the ignorant one???

are all holidays just to Florida or Disney then?

time with my family is just that. time away from work. time away from the e mails and the computer and the phone. time to just be.

you chose to be self employed - yes because there are just so many jobs out there at the moment. should I just give up my company, sack my staff and put them all out on the dole and take a "proper" job, teaching for example, so that I can take holidays in school holiday time.

We are talking about 1 possibly 2 weeks a year away ffs by a child or children with otherwise excellent attendance.

perhaps I should just become a Jedi and declare that June is Jedi month when we all have to go and worship the great god Jedi in oh where was it now *hopefulanxiety oh yes that's it Floor reed ahhh.

Mummy, there is no need to be rude. It was my choice to work on a Sunday, rather than a Saturday, as it was also my choice to focus on my family between, say, 5 and 8 each evening before getting back to work, and this necessitating weekend working.

All of those are my choices, just as working at weekends and at Christmas is a choice for you.

Being part of a religion / culture, especially in a close-knit community, is NOT a free and open choice, even if someone wishes it to be so. Being accepted in that community often means conforming to its norms, and many people do so very willingly and happily. Again by comparison, even when working at Christmas, would all those around you find it acceptable if you gave no Christmas presents because you wanted to be free of all religious and cultural norms?

teacherwith2kids - do you have a choice whether to do lesson planning?

I am not a teacher but am making an assumption based on what I have read on MN over the years that you do not have a choice. you have to do lesson planning. when you do it ie what time is obviously up to you.

it is not my choice to work weekends or during school holidays. it is my customers choice that I work then and if I want to keep myself in employment and all of my staff then that is when I have to work. there is a difference. I could no more refuse to work at weekends and during school holidays than you could refuse to lesson plan or mark work.

I am sorry but religion is very much a choice. many people bought up within one religion either change religion or have no religion. they choose not to do it. I am not saying it is easy and certainly not in close knit communities.

what about those who go along with the culture and religion of their area just so they can have the time off for observance. do you think this doesn't happen. because it does.

my point is that we either make no exceptions or we scrap the rule. we have to stop picking and choosing who is and who isn't worthy based on whether they have an imaginary friend or not.

"We are talking about 1 possibly 2 weeks a year away ffs by a child or children with otherwise excellent attendance."

As I keep saying, that is fine - just don't expect it to be authorised. And for reasons I have explained, as well as the law of the land, religion is an anomaly.

In most areas, this by itself will not lead to a fine, which I feel to be reasonable - prosecution and / or EWO support should step in only after this, when both holiday and other absence is taken into account. But the school should not be authorising an absence that is a "want".

not read right through.

Things I am pissed off with about the no term time holiday rule.

Some families are excluded. Military families, religious families esp when religious holidays occur in term time etc

Why does one family's circumstances trump another's? surely its a form of discrimination. Those families are special. Here, take time off. You lot, sorry. Suck it up or we fine you.

It should be ONE rule for every single family or NO rule at all.

But shouldnt the decision not taken to the best interest of the child?

I mean, with the Armed Forces, it is OK for that child to be off to spend some time with their parent. It is seen as important for the wellbeing of the child to see that parent, even at the detriment of school.

When some parents are working stupid hours/days as explained by other posters, is it not to be the best interest for the child to have a week or two with that parent/family?

So it's in the interest of the child to spend a religious day with family, it also is if they go back to their home country. And it also is when parents are working weird shifts/aren't allowed 'classic' holidays etc...

The thing is too, we are all going, as a society, in the direction of a 24/7 society. We want shops open at any time of the day, any day. We want flexibility. That flexibility comes with a change. Not everyone works 9-5 job, 5 days a week.
We are also in times whgere a lot of benefits are cut, people not being paid what is a living wage, forcing them to work llonger hours/unsociable hours. In ths context, family time should, imo, be given the same importance. Because for the children, it is a reall issue and parents don't alwys have the coice (See point upthread about the afct some children have never had a hols before etc...)

Mummy, if you want to change the law related to religion as a 'protected characteristic', and all the related law connected with discrimination, then that is what has to be addressed. The schools do not have a choice, and it is not the 'absence from school' regulations that make the exception for religion, it is that the protection for religious observance is enshrined in other legislation and thus taken account of in the schools legislation.

You cannot deal with this from the 'school' end. You have to start with the underlying law. Good luck.

why is wanting to take a holiday to be with your family and away from a stressful job "a want" yet the minute you bring god into it, it becomes a need?

why is the person with a religious belief more important and more valid than me.

we have just had a letter from our EA - they will fine for more than 4 days in a year missed. I need to move to Cornwall. no one has been fined there yet at all and the cornwall EA believes that anything more than 2 weeks a term is unacceptable.

Pacific, I think it is genuinely difficult to balance the needs of the child for the best education they can possibly have (which would mean full attendance) and their need for other things. The structure of 13 weeks off school / 39 weeks in school recognises that there IS a need for balance, but the whole 'delivery structure' is relatively inflexible, for good underlying reasons of pedagogy as well as pragmatic reasons around curriculum and teachers' employment.

I don't think it is in 'children in a mass's best interests to allow 'free form' holidays of 10 days for every child in every year, giving rise to a 15 / 37 structure in which the extra 2 weeks could come from anywhere.

Mummy, that is the nature of the law around religion and discrimination. I explained before why this has come about, historically, and perhaps you and others like you will be the ones who get that underlying law changed.

But it is not schools' fault that the underlying law is as it is.

I think, btw, that a good and reasonable argument could be made for a 13 / 39 week structure where all schools in e.g. a county agreed on an 'extra' 2 week block elsewhere n the year, allowing those who wanted to in that area to take cheaper holidays. However I suspect it would be no more popular than the current structure because of its relative rigidity - what people who want to take term-time holidays want is the flexibility to go 'when no-one else is there' [occasionally, for some SEN children with sensory issues, this is an entirely allowable approach], and the shorter summer break might well not be appreciated.

You cannot deal with this from the 'school' end. You have to start with the underlying law. Good luck.

of course you can deal with it from the school end, as long as you are extending to everyone else the same benefit religious people enjoy (rather than taking away the right from religious people).

So a 'because 1 person in our school is Jewish, and has 1 day off each year on a specific day for Yom Kippur, everyone else should have 1 day off too' approach? Or calculate the maximum days anyone might have for religious observance, and allow everyone else the same?

But the point is that ANY absence is a disbenefit. What you want is for everyone to be in school - by allowing everyone more days because a few people MUST be given them by law, the schools are harming children's learning. Why would they want to do that?

teacher a couple of weeks is not harming anyone

teacherwith2kids either way really. either give everyone the day off or more reasonably add up the days and give an allowance. rather than it being the total number of days pick a maximum based on the maximum days needed by the religion that asks for the most days. so if Jews need 4 days, Muslims 6 days, Hindus 3 days and a.n.other religion 7 then you would give 7 days overall. that way all the a.n.others could use all their days on their religion and the Hindus for example would have 4 extra days.

whatever you do I do agree with redstrawberry10. it shouldn't be about taking away from one but giving to everyone.

there will be a massive backlash about the current law in some schools and this kind of divide on religious grounds only serves to heighten tensions between people.

Tali, To report from earlier in the thread, yo are wrong. Absence actually harms everyone, but teachers are very adept at hiding the harm because they work extremely hard to 'catch up' a child who has been absent, and thus what parents see is 'no problem'.

"In a class of 30 children, if each child takes even 1 week of holiday in term time each year, it works like this:

Child 1 misses week 1. In week 2, Child 2 is absent, but more importantly, Child 1 has missed week 1 and now has gaps in their learning that need to be filled before they can access the work done in week 2. So an adult spends additional time with child 1 to do this, diverting the time that they would normally be using to accelerate the learning of others in the class. This repeats in week 3, when child 3 is absent but child 2 now needs catch-up, etc etc.

What the parents of each individual child will see is 'my child didn't really suffer from being away for a week' (not because the learning they missed was unimportant, or because they didn't miss anything but because the staff did their utmost to fill any gaps after they returned - an often overlooked fact).

Looked at from a 'common good' perspective, everyone in the class suffers (and disproportionately, those children who need most adult assistance to make progress) because adult attention has had to be diverted to this constant 'catch up' process."