Regularly missing school for holidays?

[loverofhol]

Parents, I’d love to hear some real-life experiences.
Our daughter is about to start at a private school, and I’m curious what actually happens in practice if children occasionally miss school for family travel. For example, if you give the school plenty of notice and take a week away in June and perhaps another week at a different point in the year.
I’m not talking about illness here – obviously children get sick from time to time. I’m specifically asking about family holidays and travel.
How do schools tend to react? Has anyone experienced warnings, fines, pushback from the school, or any other consequences?

I don’t really want to pretend a child is ill when they aren’t. Firstly, children have a habit of returning to school and enthusiastically telling everyone about their wonderful trip to Italy while they were supposedly “off with a stomach bug” 😅. Secondly, I don’t love the idea of teaching children to lie about these things.

I’d be really interested to hear from parents whose children attend private schools and who occasionally take them out of school for travel. What has your experience been in practice?

Our son’s school certainly don’t encourage it, but they also don’t clamp down on it if it’s not a regular thing. We took a week out in Feb the week before half term, for totally frivolous reasons I admit (we had a bucket list destination, but there was only one time of yr we could have afforded 2 weeks there without the weather also being unbearable). I told the school the truth and the teachers and staff were all “please, have a great time, don’t worry” etc. but one of the senior members of staff sent a template telling off email out about attendance and not taking holidays in school time. Totally accept it wasn’t really a great reason to take DS out of school, but he’s moving up to senior school next year and we would never take him out for a holiday once in senior, so it felt like if we don’t do it now, we’ll never get to do it as a family. And that’s the only time we’ve ever done that since he’s been at school. But no fines or drama from the school, just an email which they must send to everyone who does it to lay down the guilt trip - fair enough!

Our school don’t encourage it and don’t authorise it, but there are no fines and no repercussions