Does it really do any harm??

[fruitandbarley]

Holidays in school time. I'm 40, my parents took me out of school for a week once a year to go on holiday.
I've done ok for myself, don't believe it's affected me in any way.
So AIBU to ask if it's really such a big deal. ( So long as it's not a silly amount of time).
Disclaimer:- I've had wine, any spelling mistakes are due to that and not a week camping in Cornwall when I was 8).

Can I ask any sympathetic parents or teachers, please?

If I wanted to take a child out of Year 2 or 3 and out of Year 7 or 8, for an overseas trip to see relatives, when would be the least disruptive time during term time?

What would I need to do and would I possibly be fined, and if so how much?

Your best bet is to put it to the head teacher and say you need to visit in exceptional circumstances. List what your DC would be gaining from the trip. Cultural diversity, language skills, geography, history from surroundings & stories the relative tells, art taking photographs. I think that would come across quite well, say it's important that the visit is as soon as. You don't have to specify why.
Hopefully a reasonable head will see you've been quite creative & care about their education and sign it off.

I'd say it depends on where you were going and for how long Italian

It depends on both age, family circumstances and the kids itself. If you're in your last year of school and take a couple ofo weeks off, you might never catch up

I have spoken to DD and she is definate that she doesn't want to miss the first few days of term , next school year, even if it means only getting a one week holiday !

Will have to up the ante with my grovelling and pleading at work

Italiangreyhound

It must be possible for teachers to have some sort of plan for what they do which can be accessed by parents electronically.

But this still puts the responsibility on teachers to make up what the holidaying child has missed, and if sent to the office it makes work for them as well.

and in the end it still comes down to whether the child is made to complete the work.

Teacher here. I have no issues with term time holidays as long as parents apply common sense (e.g don"t book 2 weeks over an examinable component at the start of y11 when they'd had the dates for a year. Then call me asking when their child would have the 1-1 tutoring to catch them up on missed work! - true story). A week or so in year 8 probably is the end of the world in my opinion.
But, there shouldn't be any expectation that teachers will give 1-1 tutoring for all the work missed from holidays.When i was a kid you'd get a friend's book abd copy up notes so that's what I tell my pupils.

Italian It's really rather comforting that you say your child is doing well in school.
I was worried about constantly coming head to head with teachers (being, you know, that mother) and and consequently making my DS's life difficult. The fact you say it's going ok, when we share certain views, makes it all a little less stressful.

I totally agree that it would be sensible to have the basic topic list online and accessible to the parents. Why wouldn't you? It's not secret!

But I totally agree with people saying that the entire onus should be on the child/parents to catch up. One of the (many) things wrong with our education system is that the results generally matter more to the teachers than to the students. If students won't work and ignore offers of help, they should actually be allowed to fail. The teacher's job is to privide the teaching, not do it all for them. Kids would have more pride in and ownership of their work if they felt like they were doing it for themselves, not for the teacher.

Well yes, Eolian. When I went to school, admittedly very many moons ago, that's what it was like.
There was no endless tutoring just for the sake of it, either. It was mostly pay attention in class, always do your homework and if in doubt my parents would try and help. It never occurred to me that a teacher would do 121 sessions. Back when I was in school that would have been viewed as the teacher unfairly giving you preferential treatment. It's shocking how much that's changed. I'm pretty certain we'll take responsibility for our child's progress in this house.
Which brings me back to a previous point, though. If the government are going to make teacher micromanage, parents are going to become needier and needier because they don't feel like they're in charge in the first place.

italian depressing?

There is an awful lot of getting children to think for themselves- but you have to plan for this when you are dealing with 30 at a time. 30 who will all think at different rates and need different support to do so.

Please don't dismiss what teachers do as "depressing".

Yes, Lumps - teachers don't feel in charge of their teaching, kids aren't in charge of their learning, and parents feel out of the loop too. Dh is a deputy head. There is so much he'd like to change, but his hands are tied. He's in school from 7.30 until 6pm at the earliest every day, works through most holidays, but he just feels like he's forced to be part of the problem, part of the machine and is made to impose stuff on everybody. It's depressing.

I agree with you koala I took my kids out of school for 3 months when they were 7 and 9, we went to Sri Lanka and they went to the village school there. The headmistress told me I was 'ruining their lives' Yes, they missed things, and there were some hiccoughs, but nothing to compare with what they gained ....educationally and life- wise - and now at A level and GCSEs nobody would tell the difference - Life is bigger than exam grades anyway.

No wonder so many teachers burn out. Sounds pretty demoralising for your DH, Eolian.
It's really sad knowing that all those kids are being taught by teachers that don't agree with half the stuff going on.
I work in banking. It's not glamorous but it's not as target driven as it used to be and despite the fact much of it is heavily regulated, our employee surveys have actual, positiv impact on what changes are made to make our and our customers lives better.
How the same principle can not be applied to something as important as teaching is beyond me!

Having a basic topic list available online is fairly standard - we share the curriculum map with parents for KS3 and KS4.

BUT it is important for parents to note that a school is a dynamic environment. Some topics take longer to teach than others. Assessments sometimes have to be moved. Etc.

We get complaints - I kid you not - that teacher X taught Y poem before Z poem, that there is no time for revision built in before half-termly assessments, that this topic shouldn't be covered until X date, X that homework doesn't match the current topic etc. We get complaints that was covered while little Johnny was away doesn't match the curriculum map. Yup, it changed.

Stuff changes in a school. Parents can't take it as read that removing their child will have little or no impact, or that school can manage this impact for them. Sometimes it will be harmful, sometimes they will be fine - not my circus, not my monkeys.

Except that they are my monkeys when it comes to exam time, and then it's back to 'Why is my child failing English?' Er, because he has 70% attendance?

Lumps - exactly. It's one thing working your arse off and dealing with long hours and challenging kids when you actually believe in what you're doing and have the support of your senior leaders. It's quite another thing driving yourself into the ground for the sake of the government-generated merry-go-round of data and skewed statistics where children are just a nymber on a spreadsheet. It just doesn't have to be like this. The trouble is, soon there will be few teachers left who remember a time when it wasn't like this. New recruits either join the profession and hang grimly on in there until they become part of the machine, or sign up, see what it's like and go "Sod this for a game of soldiers!" and quit teaching after a year. And experienced teachers are too expensive for schools to want to employ them, if they haven't already left the profession in disgust.

Sorry for the rant, I know that's not really what this thread is about, but it makes me so mad. I'll shut up now!

My school (my department in fact) would love to employ experienced teachers...we can't find any! Half the staff we interview we have to interview over Skype because they are based abroad. The rest are supply teachers we beg to sign up to the end of the year. Finding an honest-to-god qualified teacher with a decent degree in my subject and a couple of years of classroom experience is like finding a diamond on the floor of the dodgiest pub you've ever frequented. And then you get posters on here suggesting teachers are dismissed for telling their kids off for misbehaviour, correcting uniform or expecting that homework is done on time! If they knew what it was like finding a decent teacher at the moment they wouldn't be so quick to complain!

The problem with teaching is that there about half as many of is as we need. Of course they're struggling to recruit and retain. Who in their right mind would agree to a job with an open ended number of hours - yep, in the contract - and starting on about £22k with masters level qualifications for a working week of 70 hours plus.

Parents are very often utterly unrealistic about what we should be able to achieve and more often than not the solution is for us to just give up even more of our free time. Imagine finally logging off your computer at 10pm knowing that you have no where near finished, and that tomorrow will be the same. I have 2.5 hours a week to plan the remaining 30 hours of teaching, write reports, assess, research, make resources, ring parents, and devise schemes of learning. It is clearly impossible and the system relies on the fact that I will just sacrifice my own life for school. I worked out that last year I had worked enough hours to cover the entire school year and paid back all of my holiday before Easter.

Take your kids on holiday by all means. Do it. Show them life outside of the classroom. Show them achievement not measured in targets and grades. Just don't blame me if the child is behind or expect me to catch them up in my own time.

Parents can't take it as read that removing their child will have little or no impact

Well they can, because they know their own children, and they can assess whether it will harm them or not. I know that a week off school will not harm my children, and I know when to plan it for the best time, and I know how to help them if they need to catch up on anything they missed.

or that school can manage this impact for them
I don't expect the school to manage it at all. I imagine some do, but just tell them it's up to them. I find it a little irritating that the implication is that I don't know enough or am not able to manage this for my own children.

Sometimes it will be harmful, sometimes they will be fine - not my circus, not my monkeys

No, they are my monkeys, and if I want to take them to the circus, I will. I support and value the school, I love my kids teachers, they are great. And they have no problem with my holiday plans.
I'm not being arsey when I say I can't understand why its such a problem in the UK, but then we don't seem to have half the problems that teachers in the UK have, we don't have a retention crisis, they don't work nearly as many hours or seem so stressed. All the teachers I know are very happy people, on the whole who enjoy their jobs.

NarkyMcDinkyChops: I am not sure from that that you know what 'take it as read' means. But hey ho.

I do, thank you. It's quite clear from my answer that I do. If you didn't understand that, you must have been using the phrase incorrectly yourself.

NarkyMcDinkyChops: No. 'Take it as read' means 'presume', not 'decide' or 'judge'. Some parents presume without giving the matter thought. You are obviously talking about making what you think is a considered decision. That is different.

It is also true that I don't think you are qualified to make that decision when your children are studying 10-12 subjects at secondary, but you obviously do. Fine by me. As we agree, it is your responsibility.

It's good that some schools still want to employ experienced teachers, Trifle. Narky - you're absolutely right. I'm an mfl teacher, so tend to meet people who have taught in schools in other European countries. They are often a bit baffled by the way things are here.

We need to go back to the drawing board with the whole system and start with the questions "What is education actually for? What do we really need schools to do in order to prepare children for life and make them into caring, interested, responsible and knowledgeable human beings with skills which will be useful to them and to society?"

Holiday companies charge more in school holidays because they class it as supply and demand. There is higher demand in the holidays and less demand in term time. They cash in on this higher demand by charging more.

If they try to tell you its the 'true' price and is discounted at other times they are just trying to excuse it.

I think someone on here has already said that but then contradicted this by saying they have to cover the costs of the quieter times by making peak times more expensive!

Take Center Parcs as a prime example. You try booking any weekend there and they are pretty much fully booked most weekends of the year so why do they need to up prices in the summer? cos they are greedy.

NarkyMcDinkyChops: No. 'Take it as read' means 'presume', not 'decide' or 'judge'. Some parents presume without giving the matter thought. You are obviously talking about making what you think is a considered decision. That is different

I'm afraid you are still wrong. The dictionary definition of "take it as read":
BRITISH
assume something without the need for further discussion.
"you can take it as read that you have the contract"

You said "you can't take it as read that it will or won't do harm", which means you cannot assume without further discussion that it will or will not harm". I disagreed, in that I absolutely can assume, as 1, I have done it many times and already proved that it does not, and 2. I am the parent and know my child better than you do.

So yes, I understood your usage, I replied using the same definition. You then got arsey for no reason.

Also, I used to be an English teacher. So in so many ways, I am definitely able to "take it as read" that my term time holiday will not harm my children.