To unenrol my child to take them on holiday?

[NameChange547]

DC attends an undersubscribed, small village school. There are 17 children in the class, and they can take up to 30, so I’m not concerned about us losing our place. Is there anything legally to stop me unenroling my child from school, ‘home educating’ them for two weeks on holiday, and then re-enrolling them back in school, to avoid being fined?

DC is high achieving and I’m not concerned about the academic impact. They appear to spend a fair amount of the school day relearning things they already know like phonics (DC can read fluently).

I am not arguing with that at all, and thank you to @BestZebbie for the helpful and civil comments.

I still wonder if this thread has wandered a little from the original conversation which was whether it is okay for these rules to be taken advantage of in order for the OP to take their kids out of school for an unauthorised holiday.

To which I still say it is not.

It's late, and I'm tired, so I don't wish to discuss this with you. You've not answered my question, asking if you're a Home Edder, either, so I am not going to spend a lot of time going through the details with you.

I realise this is irrelevant to the actual post but everything you wrote about home ed is incorrect.

I home ed a child with SEN- what are the concerning changes?

Thanks - it was more of a theoretical wondering rather than a fully fledged idea, but I definitely take the points on board about wasting the school’s time and pissing them off.

To those who said they would see through my idea - it was never meant to be a trick that I expected them not to see through…

The social services/they’d find out you were on holiday and you’d get in trouble stuff is BS though. We’re friends with a family who unschool and they basically walk around in the forest and bake cakes and go on holiday year round. My thoughts on that aside, there’s barely any regulation for home schooling in England and taking your child on holiday whenever you fancy is certainly allowed. My child reads all day every day and we’d do some maths games, that’s more than enough to tick the home education boxes regardless of what country we’re in.

Won’t be doing it though! Thanks to everyone for replying. I didn’t actually realise how cheap the fines are.

Imagine considering doing this to your child and to their school before even taking 0.5 seconds to google how much the fines are!

Fucking ridiculous 🙄

@ReadingSoManyThreads

You don't care if I EHE, you care if I buy into your version of EHE. I teach children who are EHE, I've read the proposals and, loathe as I am to recognise the Tories in any form, I don't see much that any reasonable parent would worry about. If anything it doesn't go far enough in terms of safeguarding. I asked genuinely, which parts are concerning, maybe I've missed something. You, like many others, chose to put the wagons in a circle and become insulting and defensive.

@NameChange547

You're missing the point. You're not proposing taking your children out to educate them at home, you're considering removing them from roll without proper reason, which is an offence. Btw, 'Unschooling' may be a fashionable phrase, but it's meaningless with regard to the law.

Is it just me that would say they have chicken pox or something? Call in sick!?

Sorry I didn’t put that very well… our LA have to confirm ACKNOWLEDGEMENT of the WRITTEN notification of home ed and will then say we can off roll the child.

@HideTheCroissants

The arrangement is between the school and the parent. As soon as the parent notifies the school, the child is off roll. Believe me, some schools take an age to tell the LA, in order to hang to funding.

I am not sure how it works in the UK but as far as I know here that a school has to have a certain about of number students in order to keep each teacher. By deregistering your student could bring the number of students low each to lose a teacher.

I know a friend of mine was put under massive pressure in her community to start her son in school at 4 so the school would not lose a teacher.

Thats not how funding works. Funding for next school year is decided by the number of pupils on roll on census day this school year. A child I take off roll tomorrow has already been counted on our census, we won’t have money taken away from us because the child has left. The school that takes them on next week won’t get extra funding for taking them on - they have to educate them from the money they already have.
The arrangement is not between the school and the parent. I’ve only worked in one LA (not all the same school) and we cannot off roll a pupil unless we have confirmation of them starting at another school or confirmation of EHE acknowledged by the LA. Off rolling after 21 days is still notified to the LA as they have become a CME. We notify the LA of our numbers weekly - that way they can place children waiting for a school place. Unfortunately even though we tell the LA promptly they usually take a couple of weeks to act on it.
My experience is all England, London borough based.

How the funding is organised and whether the child is a pupil at a school are two separate things.

As I said, a child is no longer a pupil of a school once their parents have emailed or given a letter to the school telling them that they are removing the child to EHE.

The school might still get funding for that child until the end of the funding period, but they would have no jurisdiction over the child (jurisdiction is too strong a word really- what I mean is that there would be no expectation for the child to attend school, fines couldn’t be imposed etc).

But as croissants said, the LA deals with the EHE notifications and gives schools the OK to delete them from the roll. Safeguarding to avoid the cases where abusers say they're EHE so the kid doesn't have anywhere safe. Once the ehe officer has been in touch and confirmed all is well, then the school has authority from the LA to process them as leaving from that day and not before.

This would mean that schools were keeping students on their roll for months, since initial EHE team contact can take forever, and many families refuse to engage at all.

None of these children would be expected to be at school is my point, and the parents wouldn’t be fined for non attendance.

As I said earlier, ‘safeguarding concerns’ don’t mean a child can’t be removed from school for EHE.

They're usually pretty quick if the parents engage, rather go off on one. The ones who try to drop off the radar take longer.

They might drop off the radar, but they still don’t have to send their children to school and won’t be fined for not.

If your child is still learning phonics (or the class is) are they even at compulsory school age yet? They don’t have to be at school until the term
after they turn 5 so you can take them out for a holiday without any repercussions. If they are in year 1 or 2 maybe just speak to the school - we’ve taken our children out a couple of times in KS1 for a week here and there for holidays and had no problems at all, the teacher has wished us a nice holiday and asked that the child does a little report on it when they get back. At small schools communication is even more important than at big schools, and by unenrolling and re-enrolling you will just annoy the school!

If attendance above 93% you won’t get fined.

If you go down the home school route you have to register them as home schooled with your LEA.

No you don’t.

It won’t just be for 2 weeks. You will have to wait longer while the school is consulted. Also it will still be reported and you’ll be asked to provide evidence of the education in that time period.

Phonics is taught for the duration of EYFS and KS1. In Nursery it's in the form of activities surrounding identifying sounds in the environment, nursery rhymes, etc, preparing for the formal teaching of phonics which officially begins in Reception and continues through to Year 2, although it's usually Shared Reading or similar by then (RWI in mind). Sometimes it surpasses Year 2 depending on whether or not child passes phonics screening in Y1/2 ( if they have to retake).

As an administrator in a school, I beg you not to do this just because I know the paperwork that goes into this! 😂