Term time holidays and fines

[AlRRRR]

Hello,

so before I begin my question I’m just going to say that I work in education myself and I am a trained social worker. I I understand where the new policy has come from under the new schools bill act, wdh is going through Parliament at the minute on its third reading.

fines have been in place since 2013, and I totally understand why they are in place, I may not necessarily agree.

I understand that attendance is important and if children are missing too much education they are missing chance to have great development.

this year my child’s school has decided to get extra strict about the guidelines , they’ve had a meeting with the local safeguarding educational officer. together they’ve decided to revamp the attendance policy.

This new policy is only for my child school and the other school surrounding it in the same local authority have not adopted these guidelines. The school is not in a impoverished area, there are no major problems, so we are all very confused as to why this has come about.

it now includes the following;
A fine, which is not limited to a term time holiday, you will also get fined if your child has more than five days off a term even if this is due to illness. That is the first scary part.

secondly it has changed from getting a fine when you go away during term time to now being allowed to do this a maximum of three times and then you will face criminal court and a criminal record.

Thirdly attendance is now monitored every half term which means if your child is off more than twice during half term, they become a persistent absentee with referrals made to the educational safeguarding team healthcare teams and meetings in school.

fourthly if the child is late past 910 they will be marked as unauthorised absence for the entire day even though they arrived at 9:15. there is no late mark anymore just unauthorised absence for the entire day.

this is a blanket policy and includes children who are ill and children that have been asked to stay away from school for things like chickenpox.

I think there should be some kind of leniency for example maybe one week holiday a year in term time, holiday companies and the prices go up as much as 2 to 3 times, my child is half Portuguese and sometimes the only time we can see family is by taking one or two days of at the end of the term time. there was a difference of £1500 in total for a flight taken during the holidays versus two days before term ended.

The gap between rich and poor is further widening and parents who simply cannot afford the holiday prices will simply therefore not get to go anywhere? so basically if you are rich you can do whatever you want, you get as many holidays as you want you get private education and none of these threatening criminal records….

what are your thoughts?

So the main problem is is that the educational safeguarding officer came into the school and has told the school that they need to have this new policy in place. The other local schools have not been told the same.

Yes a late mark goes down as a U and in brackets it says unauthorised absence for the morning session. This will impact on the overall percentage of attendance. So even though your child is there but they were perhaps there after the 910 register that is recorded as an absence for the morning. 🤷🏽‍♀️

with regards to lynn and say I think every single family should be allowed five days a year.

and yes the policy does state that if your child has too many sick days which is more than to a term they will be referred.

In that case the problem is potentially the safeguarding officer. They do not have the power to impose this and they appear to have told the school to act unlawfully. Complain.

This reads to me like encouraging parents to send ill children in to school.

Schools can't just establish their own laws, they're bound by the same legislation as all the other schools. Good luck to then getting anything through court at the moment!

It’s bonkers. They can’t make up their own criminal convictions. I’d like to see any parent taken to court for one day unauthorised absence a year x3 year. They’d be absolutely wasting the time of the courts on something so petty. Fining due to illness is also likely to be discriminatory and get them into all sorts of hot water as well as wasting GP time
when the NHS is under huge pressure. I’d call bollocks and be writing a firm letter to the governors asking on what basis the school have the powers to make up crimes.

@AlRRRR the letter extract that you posted says nothing about fining families of children who are ill. It does say that absence must be authorised by the headteacher, and I can certainly see how that might be misinterpreted - but sickness is automatically authorised absence, so should be fine.

It's also normal in many workplaces and schools to request a doctors note if the sickness is longer than x days.

p.s. Here is a link to the Government's guidance to schools on authorising absence from school:

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1073591/School_attendance_guidance_May-2022.pdf

@AlRRRR

I'd personally report it to the local education authority and ask if this is now "standard" and then depending on the outcome I'd alert offstead

Holidays are one thing

Sickness is totally out of people's control that's just ridiculous fining people for being poorly 😷

This is absolutely crazy. Who do schools think they are helping with this? I’m a minority religion and take my child out for religious days - this has the potential to be discriminatory imo. Also why should you have to prove your child is sick if they are sick? It’s not easy or appropriate to get a GP appointment for a lot of illness.

this is draconian nonsense imo op. I can see some parents home schooling in response.

This sounds to me like they have either had a safeguarding issue or a near miss. This policy is probably aimed at one family, but they can't make a policy for one family so they have to make it for all families.

It's a crap way to deal with whatever they are trying to eliminate.

As well as the not being able to control illness one of my friends had problems with her daughter's school. My friend is disabled and relied on either her husband or daughter helping her out of bed, if her husband was away and her daughter overslept the daughter would end up late for school.

You cannot be fined for taking your child out for religious festivals. That is automatically regarded as authorised absence.

Unfortunately, some parents falsely claim their child is sick when they want to take them out of school for a day or two. It is therefore understandable that schools want proof of sickness. Most schools are sensible about this, but a few go over the top and demand a doctor's note for every day off sick.

The fines have been in existence since 2003. The rules about fines were tightened in 2013. There has been no dramatic increase in home schooling. There has, however, been a significant reduction in persistent absenteeism.

It is not only crap, it is illegal. Schools are required to treat absence for sickness as authorised. If they suspect that the illness is not genuine they can ask for proof, but treating genuine sickness as unauthorised absence is clearly illegal.

It's just a scare tactic. If your child is not a prolific absentee, and you alway communicate with the school then you've nothing to worry about. I had similar scare tactics thrown at me from my child's secondary school, and just before they left I was told by one of safeguarding officers that it would never ever of gone as far as fines or court it just language they have to use to get results. I was angry at this because it caused major friction between mine and my child's relationship.

issuing fines for illness and for chicken pox isolation is crazy, but you are being very unreasonable because its clear in your op that your main beef is not being allowed term time holidays.

they do not "put the price up" in school holidays. they put the price DOWN below the point where they can make a profit, in the weeks where most families can't go on holiday. prioritising a holiday over a child's education is very poor parenting. an official flexible holiday allowance would be a nightmare for teachers who would then have the whole year disrupted with someone in the class needing to catch up with missed work pretty much every week (and obviously if such a stupid policy was allowed for kids then naturally teachers would be allowed it too as they are in the same boat for holidays, so schools would have to find budget for supply teachers for all those extra weeks of leave. And then once you had done all that the holidays wouldn't be that cheap any more as the companies wouldn't have to offer as much of a discount to fill their places, so the cost of term time holidays would be only 10% less than school holiday weeks rather than half price so there would ultimately be very little benefit for poorer families.

but fining people for not sending their children to school when sick or infectious is a public health disaster. I am sure that the first outbreak of norovirus will put paid to that idiocy. I suspect that it's been introduced because the school community has developed a culture of taking regular term time holidays and lying that it was actually sickness, and that dishonesty needs to be tackled.

I agree with taking a firm line on persistent lateness. It is not fair on the child or teacher and causes disruption. We had a child at our primary who was never less than half an hour late and he lived a 15 min walk from the school... An only child, mother had no job...
However having been largely inaccessible over 2 years for most children during COVID schools have lost the moral high ground on term time attendance IMO.

I agree the policy has been bought in to deal with a current situation in the school. If you don't have a poor attendance record then you will be fine. Perhaps think of the dc who will benefit from the policy by having consistency of attending school and not being always late by no choice of their own.

I thought the schools bill had been scrapped?

My dcs primary school is also obsessed with absence. Really can't help it though if they are genuinely ill and need to be at home to rest!! Also, the idea of sending them out to school carrying all manner of bugs is crazy!

The Schools Bill has been abandoned but was entirely irrelevant to this thread anyway. It would not have altered the rules around fines for unauthorised absence.

None of that is totally new anyway bar the fining for illness is it? I was an attendance officer until recently, and we would refer for persistent illness etc.

Correct. And fining for illness is illegal.

It is, and would be rightly ignored by the LA on the whole. But persistent, in and out type illness would raise flags which would be investigated.

If necessary, parents can be asked for evidence that their child is ill, e.g. a doctor's note

GP here. As a general rule we don't do letters for school absence. Most childhood illness is self-limiting, it encourages parents to bring their children to see a doctor for every cold when they should be managing it at home and we don't have the time. If schools are going to be wanting doctor evidence in large volumes they will have to commission this privately. We only do reports when there are proper child protection procedures.

Which is why school's shouldn't demand evidence for every sickness absence, only where there is reason to believe the sickness is not genuine.

Nope, not even then. That appointment for the school letter is stopping someone who needs to see the GP getting seen. Most childhood illness is self-limiting. And much of my decision is based on the parent's history so the idea that I can tell if a sickness is genuine or not is nonsensical in many cases.

I said evidence. I didn't say a doctor's note.

Schools and LAs have legal responsibilities to meet around ensuring regular attendance. They therefore have to be able to tell whether sickness absence is genuine or cover for something else (a term time holiday, attending a wedding or whatever).

But what evidence can a parent produce? Photos I suppose, if it's chickenpox. How can they evidence a cold? I realise that schools are in a difficult position, but more requests for 'evidence' are not the answer.