MNHQ here: Parliamentary debate on authorised absence from school – an MP wants to know your views

[RowanMumsnet]

Hello

Parliament's engagement team have been in touch about an upcoming debate they'd like you to contribute to: I'll let them take it from here

“Would you request authorised absence from school during term time for your child? Under what circumstances? If you have requested an absence, was it granted?"

"Steve Double MP is holding a debate on authorised absence from school on Wednesday 5 June and he wants to hear about your experiences and opinions on the topic."

"For a bit of context: in April 2017, the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against Jon Platt, a father who refused to pay a fine for taking his daughter out of school for a holiday during term-time. The judgement strengthened the controversial penalty notice system in England, under which parents may be fined for taking their child out of school without authorisation."

"Critics of the system highlight the high cost of holidays outside term-time, and the impact on tourism in the UK. The Government has maintained that ensuring school attendance is key to raising children’s attainment."

"Please reply with your views by Friday 31 May for them to be fed back to Steve Double before his debate. Alternatively, leave a comment on our Facebook page here”

Thanks
MNHQ

TooStressyTooMessy - well said.

The issue regarding the pressure that this policy is putting on NHS clinics is interesting, and which I hadn't thought about (even though we are one of the parents who keep asking for school holiday appointments for routine clinics). I do really see it at the dentist, however. I read somewhere that increasing numbers of parents are no longer taking their teenage children to the dentist, and I wonder if this can be linked with the fact that getting appointments in school holidays and after school is increasingly difficult, so parents are not bothering unless an emergency. We have certainly been guilty of seeing a dentist less than the recommended times because of the difficulty of getting slots out of school (although knowing how important it is, we do keep perservering to get an appointment). But I can well see that with the schools providing the pressure, it routine dental checks could be one of the casualties, to the detriment of the children.

Grasspigeons, thanks .

Yes Bimkom, absolutely about dentists. I perhaps should have mentioned that too but felt I had ranted long enough . Opticians is another one but dentistry is particularly an issue.

The whole policy just has so many flaws.

And the absurd thing about clinics is a lot of parents ask for an early appointment so it disrups less of the school day, but actually they get an absence code of m which is an suthorised absence, but if they had an awkward 11.15 appointment they could actually get two present codes in the register even though the child missed more school. The impact is two chikdren with ongoing medical conditions could have very different looking attendance stats and one can find grannys funeral is refused, or they get ill and and the EWO is involved and the other child has good attendance so of course they can go to the funeral.

Our DCs' dentist sends them routine appointments which are always after school.
I assume they fill the daytime appointments with working people (who have to get time off no matter what time it is), retired people and preschool children.

grass it also depends how close school/home/clinic are. We are close enough to both school and clinic that we can take a DC in for registration, and pick them up to take them to an 11.15 appointment. But if you are an hour from the clinic, unless you took them in for 9 and picked them up at 9.30, you'd be pushing it.

drspouse - oh yes of course it does - there are lots of variables and i dont think people should factor in attendance codes when accessing medical care. i was just trying to illustrate that parents actually minimising disruption or just being given lucky appointment times can have worse looking records than others even though less or the same amount of school was missed. Its an absurd basis to be used for issuing fines.

Yes exactly. DS has only missed one full day of school in his nearly 3 years due to illness (he did get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance after registration the previous day!) but has missed a lot of registrations, mainly afternoon registration due to appointments overrunning, and every time he has an 11.15 appointment that overruns he's in school both before and after the appointment, so he only misses maybe 2 hours of school.

I think allow parents 5 days optional to cover funerals or one week holiday up to year 9. More than that & I feel it's too disruptive to the child's formal education & adds to the teachers" burdens. After yr9 I'd say funeral only as the children are into exam syllabus & need to be supported by everyone agreeing education is the priority.

Yes, I actually advised one parent who was getting very wound up by the school phoning about attendance to ask for 11.30 medical appointments, take them to school so they get morning registration, then pick them up a half an hour later and just make sure they were back in time for afternoon registration, so they would't get the grief.
I did feel bad, because it the child would actually be missing more school, and there is an administrive toll for kids going out in the middle of class and the admin staff issuing exit passes, but the amount of parent and school admin time it cut fussing about the attendance (and the corresponding LA/Ofsted issues) seemed worth it (parent was very grateful, hadn't realised that this was the way to "play" the system).

One change from a parent point of view that the new policy has made for the better is that when my kids were small, you used to get letters home saying "if they seem unwell in the morning do not send them in", and listing ridiculous healing times for minor illnesses when they were supposed to be off school. As a working parent, one often felt quite guilty about sending the kid in, ancipating the irate "couldn't you see they weren't well when you sent them to school?" phone call demanding you make the hour and a half journey to school to pick them up. Now you feel like you are doing the school a favour when you bundle them up with paracetamol and send them off (although as my kids are older, the crisis of not having childcare when they are sick is less acute for me). So it is probably helping the working mums presenteeism at work issue, if not the general welfare of the school population, or the child themselves.

I think there is some merit in saying 1 week off to be used at parents’ discretion if attendance has been above 98%. 5% of attendance is around 9 days so a child would effectively have 14 days off if set at 95% attendance. That is quite a lot. Cheap Disney here we come!

I think one of the the biggest difficulties is what to do about ill children who cannot get the attendance in. Maybe a discussion with parents? There should be some flexibility for them but of course they need to catch up.

Anyone who can afford to go to Lapland or Skiing can pay the small fine with the current system. Not a lot of sympathy there I’m afraid

The big problem also seems to be different application of the rules in different schools. Schools could get over this by changing holiday dates. Our school extended the autumn half term holiday. It has to be made up elsewhere though. We went back earlier in September. It does give some leeway for cheaper holidays though, but not Lapland or skiing. Or break up earlier for the summer and go back earlier or vice versa. All schools would need to be the same in an area but it’s possible. Add a week to Easter?

Holidays are a cost you factor in when having DC. Foreign hoteliers are not going to be told what to do by our Govt and supply and demand is key. My holiday house is half the price in the Autumn half term or at Easter. Parents should be flexible about holidays and look for cheaper alternatives.

No child I have ever taught has underachieved because of a two week holiday. They might have underachieved because it came along with regular days off for a cold, a bad stomach, a headache adding up to an additional two weeks plus...

Despite me having a ten minute commute, my kids are at school in a different LA to the one I teach in. Last year our October holidays didn't match. We had already booked the week away. DS1 (Y7) went down as unauthorised but DS2 (Y5) was allowed. It's a daft system

Listening to some parents talk at swimming the other day, they are saving £1k by going away in term time. You can't argue with that!

I understand the market forces for holiday companies, insofar as I realise they have limited weeks to make their profits and will inevitably charge higher rates at times of higher demand.

What I don't understand is models used by companies such as centre parks whereby it is only possible to book combinations of Fri-Sun or Mon-Thurs.

It's not just prices that hamper families with school-age children. it's inflexibility around dates too.

I also think the previous poster who wrote about prison visits made a really important point.

Levels of literacy amongst prison inmates are awful. Their children face enough challenges to receiving an education, without having to do visits in school time.

Surely it is possible for the government to require prisons to offer families with children visits at weekends so that their schooling isn't affected?

Everyone knows travel broadens the mind

Not necessarily, two weeks all inclusive in Spain, never leaving the hotel, is hardly likely to broaden the mind!
Whatever the outcome, if a child is taken out of school for a cheap holiday parents cannot expect the school to then grind to a halt to allow their child to catch up and please do not ask teachers to waste their time setting holiday work!
Attendance criteria can be debatable as it would penalise a child who has been off with illness.
One of the reasons that the government has taken a sledge hammer to deal with this is that some oarents abused the long accepted, unofficial, 2 weeks in a school years. I once had a Year 11 pupil who went off to Australia at the end of November and returned mid January, the parents were then storming the school gates demanding lots of extra help for their child,

Teachers should get a week off in term time too, lots of them have children.

Regarding medical appointments

Dd had a period of seeing a physio about 30/40 minutes away depending on traffic

I made the appointments for 8am which is when they opened and we left at 8.30

She was in school between 9 and 10 past 9. She missed approximately 5/10 minutes of the first lesson

Not the schools fault per se but they logged it as a full session which meant that apparently she had missed 11 days of school

When at most it was an hour

I was furious

Apparently if i picked her up at 9.05 and got her back in for 1.15 it would have meant her attendance wouldnt have been affected ...even though she would have missed nearly 2 hours of education...as opposed to 5 minutes

For me, the biggest problem is that the fines system is now being used as a cost cutting exercise rather than employing proper attendance officers.

The other issue is that attendance is calculated as a fraction of elapsed days, so for eg 4 days of flu in October, then a D&V bug in November (48 hour exclusion policy after the last symptoms) can easily drop a child below the 90% threshold.

If, like me, you're not prepared to take a vomiting child into the doctors' waiting room (where they could pass their virus - which is self-limiting and doesn't actually need medical attention in an otherwise healthy person - on to someone who is immuno-compromised), you end up with a D&V bug marked as unauthorised absence.

This is clearly an insane situation, which could be avoided by allowing schools to exercise discretion, coupled with the backup of attendance officers to pay home visits where the school has genuine reasons for concern. It's hard to see the computerised system of automatic penalty notices as anything other than a ridiculous, counter-productive cost cutting exercise.

These days my son gets sent to school even when vomiting; they can phone me at work and get me to collect him. (They have done this before now - then tried to argue that their 48 exclusion period is unauthorised absence).

Like other posters have said -most of us can't afford to take children away during the holidays so what then ? Our children have to miss out in quality family time and experiencing new exciting places. Added to this for me personally is the fact my youngest is autistic so going anywhere in school holidays is a challenge as it's so busy . If they won't change the rule they should at least make exceptions.
But actually they are MY CHILDREN and I should be able to take them out of school whenever I like

Requested a day off for my son when he was in reception for his aunts wedding. Was not authorised. Can only imagine the detrimental effect missing one day of painting pizza boxes had on his education. The school 'understood the significance but could not authorise absence for this occasion' utter bollocks.

As long as you are all ok with teachers taking time off during term time for our holidays too. Means your kids won't have any teaching for a while but it's only a week or 2 so won't make any difference to their education. So all good.

HT discretion is everything. At the moment the blanket policy of authorised / unauthorised absence limits has to be applied within the arena of Special Needs schools. For some unfortunate children in those schools - our son - absence from education is going to make zero difference to his ability to gain qualifications. It's not even going to make a difference to whether he learns to tie his own shoelaces or not.

I would like to see the guidelines rewritten to allow for HT discretion to be exercised with regards to absences for all children who have an Education, Health & Care Plan. [bold for emphasis]

I think we should move to a four term system - 6 weeks off over summer (9 weeks in private sector) is too long. School could restart in mid August and there could be a longer break in October, for example. I know that is contentious, but it's my opinion. We don't have too many kids helping to bring in the harvest these days.

How is that relevant? Well, the gap in learning over the summer & subsequent "rustiness" would be decreased and therefore the odd day of missed school would have less impact on a child's education.

Clearly if a child is regularly absent then there is cause for concern, but if a child misses a day or two for a family event then it's not such a big deal.

It would also give people more options for off-peak holidays and lessen the need to go during term time. Although of course, I'm sure it wouldn't take the holiday companies long to catch up. Perhaps different areas of the UK could stagger their dates to minimise the impact?

I always smile when people complain summer holidays are too long. Where I grew up we broke of mid June and started back mid September . Which worked well for going on holiday as the season ended 1st of September .

We have had time off for funeral. If we had had to stay a day longer because of some reason or whatever, ( Eg someone was very distressed and needed support or collapsed and was ill) they could not retrospectively authorise another day.