Supreme Court sides with government on term-time holidays

[Mulledwine1]

www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2016-0155-judgment.pdf

www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2016-0155-press-summary.pdf

AIBU to get the popcorn out for the discussion of why this is/is not a great judgment?

How is it right to encourage parents to lie about their child's state of health in order to avoid unauthorised absences? How is it right to teach the children that lying is the way around the system

that is not what I take from this at all. I teach my kids that sometimes you have to just obey the rules or pay the consequences. I don't teach them to lie - that is not part of our family ethos, I do not expect that will change.

We take holidays in school holiday times, we don't have one away every year, or even every other year sometimes - we haven't the money for that and I am in retail - some times (December) are excluded from annual leave under contract.

We still SOMEHOW manage to "make memories" and even "have quality time as a family".

The problem is and will always be the parents that take their kids out every year for a week or two. I believe the better ruling (in the first place) would of been to let parents take their child out of school for a week every three years. That would of been a fair solution. But even now after the clarification, some parents I saw on TV, still said I will be taking my child out every year whether the school likes it or not. This makes it hard for those who would gladly save up for a major holiday every three years.

They aren't encouraging parents to lie and teach their children lying is acceptable, that's down to the actual parents and the values/morals.

EWOs and schools will simply ask for a sick note, it's not hard to spot a lie.

nevermindme I wonder if those parents on TV are happy to pay £1,200 per week per child to take them out of school.

Its all going to hit the fan in the next couple of months as schools meet and change their policies and LEA's do the same.

But what can the school actually do? Other than ask for a doctor's note? It's an adult's word against a child and a sure fire way to alienate parents.
Exactly that, a doctors note or other evidence. The onus is on the parent to prove the child was unwell. I agree though about alienating, but I think it encourages transparency.

Thanks mummymeister. A session is a half day but LAs set their criteria for a PN (ours is 8-20 sessions with ten weeks, with no upper limit for a holiday). Do you mean LAs will revise their criteria potentially making it much less?

But even now after the clarification, some parents I saw on TV, still said I will be taking my child out every year whether the school likes it or not.

Thing is, you can't force someone to value education above family time (or whatever their reason for taking their child out).

Like a pp said not reading with your child or not supporting them with their homework will have a greater detrimental affect on a child's academic achievement than a week off for an otherwise supported child.

I just don't get the point of it. Family holidays are not the cause of lower academic achievement. Persistent absence is, and fines are not the solution for that because reasons for persistent absence can be very complex.

#beyond the page...
Many families have children at school under different authorities with different holiday dates or are simply so cash strapped that peak holiday costs prevent them from going on holiday then. So they also can't afford to pay fines.People who argue for fines are ignorant of some family circumstances and lack empathy. Maybe they should be banned from going on holiday for ten years to learn some empathy. Compare the value of a visiting a new place, maybe a new country, and spending time with their adults and siblings to spending a week doing nothing useful in school. If I were in such a position, which I have never been, it is a no-brainer. As for wasting resources, do you mean DVD's or photocopes of festive colouring? Do you mean the time of teachers overburdened by bureaucracy desperate for few kids so they can spend an hour preparing for the next marathon sprint of term. By the last week of term, the children, under a poorly conceived and overbearing curriculum, have had enough 'learning'. What they actually need is joy and childhood (also key developmental and learning ingredients). I support anyone with a well performing, 95%+ attendance rate child who chooses to hoodwink the system for the good of their child (pending the restoration of sanity in our reactive, liberal fascist police state). They should certainly not be criminalised or fined UNLESS some generalising, black and white seeing nobody with a 'Hitler Youth' philosophy can actually prove educational detriment results from the absence in question. The law should not be used to tar all families with the same brush that a few families rightly deserve. Prove the detriment to justify the fine. No harm, no foul.

As a teacher I think you would be mad to take your kids out while studying for exams. Even one day sick could impact an exam grade. Possibly even yr 9 I would avoid but younger than that the old two week rule would be fine if lots of notice given. There is nothing more annoying than setting up a group project for one kid to be absent on presentation day!
I would like to add that teachers are not allowed time off during term time and we have to suffer the hideous hike in costs regardless and we have 13 weeks holiday too. Just try booking centre parks £1400 during holidays and £400 during term time.

Correction - not directed at BeyondThePage but as a general response to the pro-fine arguments on the page.

Disagree with it. Parents should be allowed to make these decisions not the school and as long as it wasn't at a stupid time such as near exams I don't see a problem with it, as long as no more than one instance a year for tops of 2 weeks. I'll consider taking my daughter out towards end of a term, wouldn't pull her out at the start or middle of terms

LornaD40 the rules that you are describing are what your school and LEA USED to have.

the ruling is case law. they have to change them.

Everyones criteria will now have to be revised to EXACTLY what the law says that is: No unauthorised absence - not one day, one week or one session, none.

if you take unauthorised absence then you will be referred to your LEA again not leeway, no discretion, no different rules from one area to another.

Forget what the old rules in your LEA were. unless your head gives exceptional circumstances or you go sick then you will be fined.

I have only seen a few LEA's, schools and legal people talking about the scale of those fines but they are all saying the same. that they have to be enough to deter people and £60 isn't.

when you speed in a car, its not the fine that hurts its the penalty points, the raising of your insurance costs and the possibility down the line that if you keep on doing it you lose your licence.

The govt made the mistake of thinking £120 (£60 per parent per child) would be enough not realising that the cost of holidays was so much more (stupid, out of touch naïve whatever you want to call it but they screwed up)

They know this now and have for some time - the last committee that sat and took evidence on this had realised this.

so that is why the fines issue was mentioned in the judgement and the expectation is that it will rise to make it prohibitive.

and Goldiloz I am in exactly the same boat as you only the polar opposite. I cant take holidays at weekends or during school holidays. I am tied to that time. now I wont be give authorised absence so we either go away with the kids one parent at a time or sit it out for the next however many years until our youngest finishes school.

teachers aren't the only people with prescribed holidays. lots of us are.

' Compare the value of a visiting a new place, maybe a new country, and spending time with their adults and siblings to spending a week doing nothing useful in school. If I were in such a position, which I have never been, it is a no-brainer. '.....how on earth can you decide a child is not doing anything useful in school ?
And what about the children whose parents are never going to afford a holiday no matter if it is term time or holiday time ? It is rather divisive to say that family holidays are so important that families must be given the right to disrupt a child's education and then not give every child the 'precious' opportunity ...

If you can afford to take your child on a holiday ..lovely , if you can't well the child is not going to suffer unduly
holidays are not god given rights !

and as for the comments that at the end of week reosurces are dvd and colouring in, well i also take umbrage that that is what goes on.
Term times are for education, holiday times for colouring in/dvd/playing outside or whatever...tax payers pay for the education of the country's children and when at school they should be being educated . I do nto think colouring in and watching dvds or cleaning out the art cupboard is good use of resources.
But is we start to argue that as these end of term activities are not education then it is ok to take a child out for a family holiday then how to you enforce that and say it is not ok to take them out the week before, or the first few days back when everyone is making nice new timetables etc....

It is rather divisive to say that family holidays are so important that families must be given the right to disrupt a child's education and then not give every child the 'precious' opportunity ...

But the pp was arguing that it is more beneficial to a child's education so it would not 'disrupt' that education.

Education is about a lot more than academics. As a look at any private school website would attest to.

theredjellybean - you have a very narrow view of what education is. Cleaning out the art cupboard could be a really valuable experience for children - organisation, responsibility, an understanding of resources.

To be honest I'd like to see fewer school holidays (maybe 6 fixed weeks a year), to give space for a more relaxed approach in schools with more chances to repeat tough topics and more time for music/sport/drama/art(the curriculum is too compressed) and then people just take an allowance of holidays (maybe 2/3 weeks over the year) whenever they like (including the teachers - they can just get a supply cover in for the week). That would fit 21st century life much better than the 19th century approach we have at the moment.

i certainly do not disagree with the educational value of trips/holidays. There is indeed a lot to be gained for a child out of these, but if we are going to argue that termtime holidays are ok based on the fact they are of educational value , what happens to all the thousands of children who are not getting any holiday anytime at all ?
And though trips do have potentially educational value , they do disrupt a child if taken during termtime...that child is missing out on whatever their class mates are doing that week or fortnight, now of course in younger years this is not quite a poignant and can easily be made up but from yr 4 or so onwards classes are working through a curriculum and there just is not time to go back and help a child catch up on two weeks of stuff..not to mention the possible disruption to the rest of the class.
imagine a class of 30 yr 6 children and 15 of them take 2 weeks each at different times over a school year to go on a family holiday...now imagine that teacher trying to get them caught up, and trying to give them the work they missed and help explain maths problems the rest of the class learnt, or if they missed 2 weeks when everyone else was learning lines and rehearsing the school play or the choir learnt a new song for the christmas concert etc etc.....it is not just the one child affected. I wouldnt want to be that teacher !

Mummymeister I very much agree with your posts. I don't think people have grasped that the old system had gone and the impact on every absence not just holidays.

The local authority legal depts will be reviewing matters and it will probably be a few months before the first 1 day fines or over &1000 fines per parent per child fines are issued. Then people will be up in arms.

Your auntie example is a good one. I can imagine heads will draw up criteria for authorising in exceptional circumstances to save the you have allowed child x but have refused y arguments. So yes to service personnel about to be deployed, A list of permitted funerals sibling/parent/grandparent. But life doesn't fall into neat little boxes and fact 'Grandma' is legally auntie means unauthorised.

It's easy to sneer at Disney world holidays but that is not looking at the bigger picture.

maybe i do have a narrow or perhaps very old fashioned view of education....:)
as for the value and skills learnt cleaning out the art cupboard...well i learnt them at home while on the very long boring holidays, when i was left ot tidy my bedroom or walk the dogs etc ....spent at home because my parents worked, had their own business and couldn't take the time and certainly did not have the money to take us on holiday

I have some sympathy with teachers trying to catch children up but in the 21st centruy there is no shortage of resources for parents to use to not allow them to fall behind in the first place - Twinkl, Khan academy and education city. it should become easy enough for a teacher to say 'oh you're off next week - make sure you look at the resources on the VLE before you come back.

And I think parents should only take their children out of school if they are happy and confident with supporting their children with this process. It's why I might consider taking my kids out for a short period of time occasionally up until year 9 - there is nothing I wouldn't be able to help them catch up with until then. However some aspects of the GCSE maths curriculum would be out of my reach so I wouldn't risk it.

theredjellybean you could say the same about a child with a chronic illness or a child whose parents cant be arsed to send them in every day. Or a school which offers a ski ing trip mid term or the wretched thing that is "Enrichment week"

Classes are disrupted all the time - that's the nature of our education system surely.

to me, this issue is about giving back the power and responsibility to the head teacher to make the decision and for parents to then respect that H/T decision.

Mrscog I absolutely do not want to see fewer holidays. Private schools have per head better results and longer holidays. Universities have less contact time than schools.

I want to see fairer funding of education for those of us in rural areas. I want to see teachers given the respect their profession deserves and the trust to mean that we get rid of worthless testing like SAT's and I want to see and end to the constant changing of the curriculum, exams system and any other whim by the govt in charge at the time. I also want to see much better support for those with needs. But more than anything, I want to see someone actually spend the money and put in place a system that gets the kids with regular absences to school. this is the big problem and still no one tackles it.

the child who is off one day a week and the child who comes in late every single day is more disruptive in my view because they are the ones with parents who either cant give a shit or whose lives are so chaotic they cant get their kids to school on time or at all.

this is where I would put the energy and resources. not in chasing up fines for a week in Wales by a parent of an otherwise well attending child.

Mrscog will you be happy to pay £1,200 per week per child to do this then?

Thank you Dixiechiconhols - I can see the daily mail sad faces now but really do hope people wake up very quickly to this change and stop thinking of it costing £60.

they do disrupt a child if taken during termtime...that child is missing out on whatever their class mates are doing that week or fortnight, now of course in younger years this is not quite a poignant and can easily be made up but from yr 4 or so onwards classes are working through a curriculum and there just is not time to go back and help a child catch up on two weeks of stuff..not to mention the possible disruption to the rest of the class.
imagine a class of 30 yr 6 children and 15 of them take 2 weeks each at different times over a school year to go on a family holiday...now imagine that teacher trying to get them caught up, and trying to give them the work they missed and help explain maths problems the rest of the class learnt, or if they missed 2 weeks when everyone else was learning lines and rehearsing the school play or the choir learnt a new song for the christmas concert etc etc.....it is not just the one child affected. I wouldnt want to be that teacher !

Children follow a curriculum from day 1, its doesn't just start in year 4 or so.

And I've already said this a few times on this thread but here we go again:
I am a teacher (primary) children work at different levels. In a class of 30 there will be a wide variety in the levels the children are working at. I differentiate for all the children in the class, they do not have to 'catch up', they work at the level appropriate for them, if they pick it up quickly they move on, if they don't they get more support.
If we were always waiting for children to 'catch up' so they were at the same level we would never get anything done.

I agree that exam years would be different and time lost may have a detrimental effect but non-exam years and an otherwise supported child? A week for a family holiday is not going to make a big difference to anyone.

jellyfrizz I know how you feel. I keep saying that the fines are not going to be £60 and no one is listening to that either.

shall we meet up on a thread in 6 months time with the daily mail sad face poster who has a £2,400 fine and you and I can still say the same things?

I just think some people who don't teach don't get it. they don't realise that you are adjusting what you do with each and every child all the time.

its not piece work or building a machine.