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?

Holidays aren't essential. They are nice to have. Lets face it those that say that holidays are educational are talking complete rubbish when they've off to Disneyland or on an All Inclusive in a resort around a pool. Its not some short hop to the seaside its usually 2 weeks or more.

You treat school like some sort of throw away commodity don't be surprised when your child doesn't want to go and has zero respect for their teachers and school. Pay the fine and take the consequences don't moan about it.

Doesn't happen at good schools now.

Holidays aren’t educational. Going to Egypt or Rome isn’t educational but … reading about Egypt or Rome and dressing up as romans and Egyptians like in my school is educational?

Please remember , there is more world outside Disney and all inclusives. Many of us like this world. This world is educational. So is visiting the country we live in

But that is the opposite of what the previous poster said. She was specifically referencing Disney holidays and similar.

Working in education, this is my take. In the current system children, teachers and school are under a lot of pressure to

1. make sure children meet targets
2. make sure children know the stuff that they need to learn in their current grade so that they ready to do the learning designed for the next year(s)
3. mostly a teacher is expected to teacher 30ish children at once, with one other adult some of the time if they are lucky.

The fact there is barely time in the system to make sure every child learns what they are required to. There's barely time to support the ones that struggle without holding back the whole class. A lot of days someone will be sick, or have a medical appointment, so someone will need stuff recapping. Adding to that the probability that someone will be off on holiday and so will need the whole week recapping just adds to the stress.

When you take your child out for a holiday in term-time, you make the jobs of people with difficult jobs harder. You create more work for overworked people. You disrupt the education of a whole class by making your child require something special. The fines are high because if people find that the "price" for their "cheap" holiday is actually the same price or more than in holidays, hopefully you'll not take your kids' out which will help their teachers, their classmates and their school!

Don't get me wrong, I don't agree with the whole system, there should be much more opportunity for children to learn at their own pace. There shouldn't be so much pressure that catching up one student is horribly disruptive. It shouldn't be a problem if one child doesn't learn something right then for whatever reason, there should be time to recap it later. There should be value placed too, on whatever your child learns on their holiday, even if it isn't a core skill on the curriculum for this year - the other language words they pick up, the maths they learn in using a foreign currency, the swimming skills, even the fact they shared the pool toys nicely with the other kids. But the reality is, those things won't help them pass the tests, or help them or the school feel better when they don't.

😥

What a great post. You've summed it up brilliantly. Thank you.

We personally just go on holidays abroad every other year, during school holidays. That way we can cover the cost, and they don’t miss any school. We do a holiday or week off work doing day trips etc, then year after the abroad hols.
I don’t feel strongly what other parents do, but personally we have found that if our children are unwell and miss a few days, it does impact on their learning, more so if in certain years where transitions or exams take place.

So we haven’t really felt comfortable with the idea of taking a whole week or 2 off school intentionally.

There are 5 inset days per year. Just put them all in the same week (and at different times to other schools), sometime in the summer term of September rather than spreading them out throughout the year.

Job done

Fabulous post by stichguru above. I really do feel for teachers. In an ideal world, as they say, there would be the flexibility in the curriculum to recap and catch up missed sessions, but its just not there. They already have to cram so much in, whilst differentiating it to varied learning needs and SEN. We can only work with the system as it is, rather than how we would like it to be.
So anyone taking children out of school during termtime needs to strongly consider whether it is absolutely unavoidable. There are a very small amount of circumstances when it is, but getting a cheaper holiday is not one if them IMHO.

That wouldn’t work for anyone that has children in different schools 😂 like one in primary and one in secondary.

I feel a bit like they’re using a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
They claim it’s to cut down on regular school absences but we know they’ll never reach the right people. There are parents that take their kids to Spain or Portugal or wherever and get a fine, yet the rest of the year I bet their kids are there.
The kids who don’t go to school for weeks on end and often have parents who don’t know or care where they are get off with no fine and no one probably even bothers them.
They pick the low-hanging fruit rather than address the real problem (as usual).

Well, no, we don't have to accept that that is how it is. We don't have to accept the underfunding of the education system. If teachers don't have time to catch students up, they don't have time to cope with individual student's learning differences. We need better working conditions for teachers.

Ultimately, you have a legal responsibility to make sure your child receives an education.

So does their allocated school, and the Local Authority.

Yet during Covid they completely ignored their legal responsibilties, which include providing a full time education for them outside school if it is not possible for them to attend school for 15 consecutive school days or more. Where are the consequences for that? Are the Local Authority staff and teachers being prosecuted?

They also deliberately ignore these legal responsibilities in respect of many, many children with SEND, leaving them with no access to formal education for months or even years.

Once the above has been rectified and similar fines and criminal records applied to the so-called professionals involved in that negligence then perhaps it might be acceptable to target parents choosing to take their child with otherwise good attendance out of school for a few days, but not until that far more egregious, damaging and illegal behaviour by "education professionals" has ceased.

Maybe it would work if it was done by county or something? Like I don't think small local day out places (farms, castles etc) would probably raise their prices anyway, and would theme parks and things risk it just cause a small percentage of the country was off?

And I must say, that as someone who missed 2-3 weeks of school per year as a primary-aged child for holidays, I don't feel any detriment. I remember many of those holidays and learned a lot. No idea what we were learning (or not) at school at the time but I went on to get straight A*s/ As at GCSE/ A level, two degrees and a professional qualification so in my particular case it did no harm whatsoever. In fact, a lot of good to have more downtime in the year.

As for my children, one of them was denied access to school for over a term due to them withdrawing previously agreed SEN support then refusing to discuss it at all. They then stated - when I asked what I should work on with her over the summer holiday to help her catch up the work they'd prevented her from accessing - that in fact she'd exceeded all academic targets at the end of the Reception year so apparently it did no damage in academic terms to miss an entire term of school, according to her teacher's assessment.

They did enormous damage to her mentally, though, and to my own health as well, so now I'd have no qualms about taking her on holiday in term time should I choose to and if they had the audacity to criticise this after effectively forcing me to homeschool her for 3.5 months while doing a full time job, and having to pick up the pieces of the severe harm they caused to her undoing years of paintaking support prior to starting school, I would laugh in their faces.

Could anyone give definite answer on the best way to do this if you want to take kids out without getting massive fine or being prosecuted. Could some explain it to me like I’m 5. Thank you.

How often can you take them out and for how long over a period of 3 years?

Yet during Covid they completely ignored their legal responsibilties, which include providing a full time education for them outside school if it is not possible for them to attend school for 15 consecutive school days or more. Where are the consequences for that? Are the Local Authority staff and teachers being prosecuted?

Those decisions were taken by central government and schools told to get on with it, with or without adequate resources.

It was not a term-time holiday,

But then you know that, or ought to.

It's in here:

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

They're spaced out to ensure training and prep can be as applicable as possible to ensure the best outcomes for pupils. Moving them to allow for cheaper holidays would have a detrimental effect on all children's education in school.

The legal responsibility of the allocated school and separate legal responsibility of the Local Authority to provide a full time education whether the child was able to attend school or not remained law throughout, yet most did not comply with this at all, and for far longer than a week or two of holiday.

“Have teachers suddenly started providing lessons all the way through?”

The primary I work in, there are ‘proper’ lessons in the last week of school.

we've also been doing lessons in the first week back . So the children in our Year 3 Class, whose parents have taken them on holiday have missed maths , English , guided reading, beginning of our topic on Ancient Egyptians, and science topic on rocks, amongst other things. They will now have ‘gaps’ to catch up on. Not to mention, they’ve missed settling into their new class with everyone else.

I do think holidays should be allowed,(eg a maximum of 10 school days) but it’s the people who keep their kids off at the drop of a hat ( e.g birthdays, shopping trips, etc) that are the real problem. Same with being perpetually late.
But how would you feel about a teacher or TA having that time off to take their own children on holiday??? We are not supposed to take term-time holidays, and therefore have no option but to go in the expensive school breaks!

I also notice, @echt you conspicuously partially quoted my post ignoring the part about these same "professionals" breaking the law by denying many SEND children any safe access to a formal education for months or even years.

As I said, once this illegal behaviour is dealt with via a similar robust approach (personal fines and court proceedings, criminal records etc) then it may be appropriate to target parents, but not before.

Lobby the holiday companies, not the school. Taking kids out during term time is disruptive.
What if 25 kids out of 30 did this in exactly the same week?