Term time holidays

[Idontusuallypostonherebut]

I'm a parent governor at my little ones school. I guess I would say I support the school in most of their policies, but some of them I find a tad ridiculous. I know that the government or the LA are the ones behind fines for taking children out of school for unauthorised absences. But having sat in the recent meeting and hear the HT saying oh yes we definitely enforce the fines for unauthorised absence. It just leaves me a bit baffled why because not once in these meetings have they ever said that the LA gave that money to the school.

I know the argument is mostly something like if parents get a fine once it might make the think twice about doing it again... But the reality is it likely won't. If you're going to get fined 60 pounds for each parent and it's considerably cheaper for a holiday in term time you're most likely going to do it again.

Over the weekend we were catching up with friends and one mum said her kids finished school on 15th December, and only go back on the 5th - for one day, she said if they had been abroad visiting family they'd have stayed away until 5th or 6th so the kids benefit from longer with relatives. One friend always takes her children away the weekend right before the summer holidays start - weirdly our schools seem to do Tuesday or Wednesday finish, so she just calls them in sick those 2/3 days. My sister in law sometimes takes her kids out at the end of the week before the official end of term too because she says otherwise they can't afford to go to visit family abroad. I read a post on here last week about people saying it didn't feel very Christmassey because the kids were at school until late.... I know some schools didn't finish until 22nd and then of course it was practically Christmas eve, so no time to prepare /get over the end of term sickness bugs. Someone said they also took their kids out the last few days to avoid them getting sick for Christmas and to do crafts and stuff in their house, as the children aren't really doing much in school those last couple of days anyway.

I don't know I just feel a bit like am I the only one who isn't taking kids out of school to benefit from more time with family /cheaper prices /avoiding illnesses. Last year my husband wanted us to take a term time holiday and I shot him down, we argued about it and paid a fortune for the same holiday in school holidays time.

I wish we'd taken those 3 days off so we didn't get a sickness bug/flu that was doing the rounds and took us out for the pretty entire holiday so far.

But I read a post on here, about 10 years old now - but people were saying a parent governors position should be untenable if they don't support the school on unauthorised absence. People were saying the parent governors as part of the board have to approve the policies but this is a government policy so not optional

So what are people's opinions......

Yes, you could tell them that but if you didn't pay the fine you could be prosecuted and end up with a far bigger fine.

I would still refuse to pay.

As a secondary teacher what bugs me is the requests for school work to be completed whilst child is in holiday, or the time requested to help child catch up. We start our GCSE course summer term of Yr 9 (English teacher so in order to teach the two courses we need to do that), I currently now have a pupil in my Yr 10 set who missed the teaching of a nearly a whole set text as she went to the US for 3 weeks. Parents say “oh, they won’t fall behind if work is provided” so actually what’s the point of teachers then? Not arguing myself out of a job but maybe we don’t need teachers at all if pupils can just teach themselves from a lesson plan (lessons plans don’t contain knowledge or processes). That went strangely off tangent but some parents I have had dealings with think requesting a lesson plan is an adequate substitute for being in class in person.

It's a terrible policy. There's no evidence that it actually combats absence at all, much less that of the most damaging type. It was bad enough pre 2020, but feels particularly iniquitous to many parents given that the majority of our children were simply denied school for a couple of terms not so long ago. There was some research not long ago basically saying what a shitshow of a policy it is, and it mentioned the potential for alienation and damage to the parent-school relationship.

In terms of your position as parent governor, if a PG is otherwise good at the role I'd be gutted to lose them because they could correctly identify an imposed government policy as moronic.