To think the penalties for term time absence is ridiculous..

[JKbowling]

I got this in my email inbox today, sent to all parents and guardians.

"Failure to safeguard a child's education" appearing on your DBS, really?

As for term time holidays. If a family can't afford to pay for their one measly UK break per year to be had during the 6 weeks holidays (because the prices are hiked right up and become unaffordable) how does school suppose said family is going to pay the fine?

You know a poster is losing the argument when they resort to ‘what about’- ism. The government gets a number of things wrong, does a number of things poorly- that doesn’t give us permission to opt out of laws / regulations.

No, I think it's important for kids to attend school and there should be a deterrence. I think the problem is the tourist industry bumping up prices during school holidays. Pure greedy profiteering.

Ours authorise hospital appointments on production of an appointment letter. My daughter has on average 1-2 per month an never had any issues with them not authorising.They have also authorised for weddings and funerals. Their line, which I think is correct, is they will authorise any absence outside a parents control. But if a parent makes choice to book a holiday outside holidays, that's clearly within our control.

There are plenty of countries who don't fine people for taking kids or of school occasionally, and the education system does not fall apart!

Let's be REALLY optimistic and say that it would only take an hour to collate the plans for all the multiple lessons in different subjects that a child misses over a week, and convert that to a format that can then be mailed to a parent, and used by that parent to any meaningful degree - that's still almost a working week lost if they did it for every kid in a class of 30 each year.
Taking kids out of school for a cheaper holiday and expecting teachers to put in a load of unpaid overtime preparing packs to catch them up is showing a breathtaking sense of entitlement. I'm not surprised that they ignored you.

This is part of it, yes. I don't want to have yet another discussion about whether schools ought to have closed or not, even as someone who saw this coming at the time and said so. We did it, and consequences flowed from that decision. It's done.

Basically, it turned out that general population buy in for kids going into school every day wasn't as embedded as some people thought it was. It was a sufficiently fragile cultural norm that it didn't survive being temporarily interfered with.

There's also the issue that remote learning suited some DC very well, and they had chance to realise this. There are some kids for whom having to be physically present in school is the problem, and they were given an extended opportunity to realise this. And then also, there are so many parents who are pissed off with the state response to covid and education in some way. People who are pissed off about schools closing, reopening, masks, not enough masks etc. They're often in direct opposition to each other, but they have in common feelings of betrayal and alienation. Trust has been eroded.

Pandemics often bring about significant social change, so none of this is a surprise. But it does mean that pissing about with a fining system that doesn't work isn't going to achieve anything.

Maybe. But whatever the reasons the attendance issue needs addressing one way or another as if not it will spread further. Laws are made for the whole not the few. I don't make them.

When I was a young warthog we missed 2 weeks of school for a holiday and immediate family wedding on other side of the world. School gave my parents chapters of our text books to do to keep up for English, Math and Science.

When we got back my class wasn't even half way through the work they'd given me to do, which I had completed (we did 2 hours each night). Similar story a couple years later.

I got A* in all my GCSE exams, and went on to do a degree and PhD in one of the subjects. A one off holiday doesn't mean you don't value education.

Yes it is a huge issue. I'm a school governor, we were looking at the figures around this last night. The children with the lowest attendance on average had the lowest attainment. Also, children in receipt of pupil premium (indicating from a disadvantaged background) had the highest number of termtime holidays, further disadvantaging them and widening the attainment gap further

But as people have pointed out why is only English schools need fining? It doesnt happen anywhere else in UK . If the absence rates are so different what the Scottish, Welsh NI schools doing to have better attendance rates. Or if they are not much different does it not show that fining doesn't work? Because 'obviously" the schools that issue fines will have better attendance than those who don't? Won't they?

Well that's where your wrong I did take make kids to haven in Norfolk in June it was still over £1000,first holiday in 6 years.

Yes. One of them really, can't do nothing, got to do something and tackling the persistent absence issue with parents that don't really care vs tackling parents that want to take kids on term time holidays (and who doesn't) is 2 separate issues. The holidays one is probably an easier fix.

I think it’s outrageous the price difference between going on holiday during term time and going during the six week summer holiday. Something needs to be done about that as even taking into account the fine, it’s still going to work out cheaper to go away during term term.

That's a poor reading of the statistics though.

We both know that the DC missing a week for a holiday who have otherwise high attendance and engaged parents are fine. The pupils who are struggling because of attendance aren't struggling because of holidays. It's poor physical or mental health or poor parental engagement. But that's hard to deal with, so let's ban term time holidays, antagonise the engaged parents, create more headaches for overworked schools and leave the absence statistics for the struggling pupils exactly as they were because a fine changes the square root of fuck all for them.

But hey, look, the total attendance percentage looks better!

Well, for one thing, it’s not compulsory to give your patronage to Jet2, Tui etc. I never have.

For another, it’s just business: prices do go up during times of assured occupancy/usage otherwise the company wouldn’t hit their annual targets. Lower prices in the summer would mean they all went bust.

I think it's a shame that a Head's discrepancy has been removed.

My kids are now 19 & 23 for
Context.

Over their school years I had several family issues abroad that necessitated me going and having to take DC with me.

We were always given permission to go, one visit was effectively for half a term when they were much younger.

To go on holiday is a privilege and it's right that you should pay a fine.

The problem is that people with genuine reasons to take their kids out are hammered because so many people now abuse the system.

I have never taken my DC out for a holiday.

And those saying a holiday exposes kids to language and diverse cultures are talking out of their arse.

Two weeks in Spain does not a bilingual make

Yep the issues are different. I don't actually think the holiday one is particularly fixable either, tbh, but there's a reluctance to acknowledge the reasons for that.

It really did take a long time and a lot of work for the sort of cultural buy in that we had for kids being in school every day in 2019. It wasn't until the Blair administration that attempts to address persistent absence got serious. I'm from a particularly deprived area, so am an extreme, but in my community there are people still in their 30s who basically stopped going to school when they were about 13 and nobody cared. If anything, them not being there to be disruptive and fail their GCSEs was a mutually beneficial situation. This was happening well into the 21st century.

And then the pandemic plus the policy responses to it and cultural aftermath have changed things again. The consensus was interfered with, and it turned out it was one of the things we can't switch back on again after we switched it off. I don't think we're in a position where legislation would do anything about this. Would have to be cultural change, but I don't see how.

This is the problem you think it's about winning or losing an argument. Why can't you accept people may have different opinions to you

Is the issuing of fines or presumably reporting parents for "failing to ensure attendance" down to the schools? At their discretion?
Would the Muslim parents be fined for taking a child to the Hajj? Or a traveller family for taking a child to Appleby horse fair?
Go for the low hanging fruit.

There you go:

https://educationhub.blog.gov.uk/2024/08/19/fines-for-parents-for-taking-children-out-of-school-what-you-need-to-know/

This 100% the government are burying their heads in the sand. School avoidance has skyrocketed since covid but they won't focus on that as would mean putting more money into mental health so it's easier to make out the problem is families having a weeks holiday and the people on here agreeing with them don't seem to grasp that. Throwing out numbers like this amount of children where off the last week of term how many where actually on holiday and how many have been absent for months/years

It’s only a deterrent to families on a budget. For some families £160 is an afternoon jet skiing, for others it’s half the accommodation.

At least it’s less patronising than the ‘5 mins late adds up to 7 years of missed school and 3 failed GCSEs.’ That email sends me up the wall after a year off during covid.

Meh. I don't think a foreign holiday is a life necessity to be honest so can't get worked up about it.

My friend teaches in a secondary school in Wales, rural area lots of farming. The children are missing at various times of the year to help out on the farms. Lambing, harvesting, baling etc. there are no fines, it's a given that they will be absent. She teaches English and says it's frustrating but there's nothing to be done.

This obsession with attendance in England is bizarre especially in the very young ones who are off a lot with illnesses baffles me. We just have to email school stating the reason for absence in the case of illness. Get permission if holidays are booked which overlap term time or an adult family member is taken ill.

Our head has more autonomy and discretion at primary level.

These days with so many mothers working they really don't want your sick child to infect theirs.

Oh you can be fined in Wales, but it’s a bit less rigorously implemented than in England.