Term Time Holiday

[wonderings2]

Apologies I know this gets asked all the time, Im doubting myself with the new guidelines...

We would like to go away spring half term, we managed to go from the Monday to Monday last year as the second Monday was an inset day. which made it slightly cheaper.

Looking at dates for next year and its no cheaper, however if we were to go a few days either side the flights are around £650 compared to £1500 (the accommodation is only slighter cheaper) but it would mean DD (year 1) would miss either the last 2 days or the first two days of the term.

Looking at the guidelines unless she meets the trigger for the total number of individual sessions missed, the trigger point is 5 consecutive days for the fine? Or I am reading it to suit me wrong?

Would it be awful for her to miss those days? Do the teacher care?

I believe it has to be 10 sessions or more to result in a fine so 5 days. I think this is the route we will go down to tag it on school holidays. We did it at beginning of school year last year and it was fine, no harm done.

<attendance lead at a secondary. I issue these fines>

It's 10 sessions (ie 5 days) unuathorised absence in 10 school weeks. Doesn't need to be consecutive. Doesn't need to all be holiday, although it's easier for schoos to evidence if it's all holiday. Unauthorised is N, O, G or U codes.

What counts as unauthorised?

Unauthorised absence codes:

G code = Holiday
U code = arriving later than 30 mins after registration opened, without valid reason
N code = no reason supplied
O code = Unauthorised. Either you didn't tell school or the reason given wasn't an authorised reason to be absent

Thank you, luckily she hasn't missed any time this term and her attendance was good last year so Im hoping two days wont make much difference in year 1.

Thank you, this is really helpful 🙂

You may well get flooded with people on here declaring you as being evil for taking your child on holiday during term-time but FWIW here's my probably quite unpopular opinion...

I used to be like this until that pandemic in 2020-21 and the 2022-23 teacher strikes. During this time I experienced some very shoddy teaching and commitment from our children's schools. Their selfish attitude during the strikes was really surprising and it became pretty evident that they didn't care half as much as I had previously assumed. This was by no means across all teachers in all schools but for some reason mine were particularly impacted.

Now I have zero guilt about taking my kids out and it's been great. Highly recommended.