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Meet the Allards, a family who take their kids on holiday during school
Booking a getaway during the school holidays means paying exorbitant rates, spending hours in bumper-to-bumper highway traffic and crowded destinations.
But families are more comfortable taking their kids out of the classroom to travel, especially since the pandemic.
In the mainstream school system, parents are legally required to ensure their child attends school on all school days, unless there is a reasonable excuse, and a department spokeswoman said: “Disrupting student learning and taking holidays during the school term is strongly discouraged.”
The Allard family travelled full-time for almost four years, with home-schooling giving them the flexibility to not be stuck travelling during peak times.Credit: Instagram: @allards.across.oz
But holidays are considered “a reasonable excuse” in Queensland.
Term 3 starts today, meaning school holidays are almost 10 weeks away. Or are they?
Kerry and Troy Allard decided to travel with their children for a year, from mid-2019, and ended up travelling full-time for almost four years across Australia, while home-schooling.
“We wanted to spend quality time as a family while the kids were young,” Kerry Allard said.
Allard said travel taught children to be flexible, resilient and mature, and they learnt to interact with people of all ages, and respect nature and culture.
“The children have experienced things on their travels that most adults won’t in their whole lives,” she said.
The Allards, now based on the northern Gold Coast, put their three children in a mainstream school at the start of 2023, but still take breaks during the term.
“We know firsthand the benefits of travel for our children, so within reason, we take our kids out of school during the school term and hit the road for extra-long weekends or an extra week or two outside the holidays,” Kerry said.
“It’s much less busy and you get a better experience.
“It’s also much cheaper travelling outside of the peak periods.”
Brisbane state primary and high school attendance data, analysed exclusively by Brisbane Times, reveals attendance at most schools was lower in 2023 than in 2021, but last year’s data showed an improvement on 2022.
However, attendance rates have not recovered to the levels before the pandemic.
Reasons included everything from illness, medical appointments, family reasons and bereavement, disciplinary reasons and holidays.
Queensland University of Technology education researcher Dr Rebecca English said it seemed families had a different relationship with schools post-COVID.
“It seems they’re probably less likely to think, ‘we’ll wait until the next holiday, a few months, next year’ any more because, as we saw with COVID, ‘we might be trapped here and grandma/the kids/we aren’t getting any younger’,” she said.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if COVID hadn’t had a radical effect on parents’ willingness to just say ‘stuff it, pack your bags, we’re off’.”
It is a global phenomenon, with The New York Times reporting in March a sharp increase in student absenteeism in the four years since the pandemic closed schools in the US, with families setting off on trips with the assumption children could keep up with schoolwork online, while heightened anxiety kept others away, as the relationship with school “became optional”.
Struggles to bring children back to the classroom also mirror difficulties bosses have bringing employees back into the office.
English said families took trips during the school term because of cheaper airfares, cruise tickets and accommodation during low season, but in some cases, it might be the only time they could take leave, or attend a relative’s funeral overseas.
She said children learnt a lot from travel. For example, on a driving holiday from Brisbane to Canberra that includes a trip to parliament, Questacon and the National Gallery, they would learn about various towns, how long it takes to drive that many kilometres, budgets for petrol, accommodation and food, covering elements of maths, English, humanities, science and the arts via lived experiences.
“And if you go overseas, as some families will, you can add in different cultures, you can add in languages,” she said.
“But, also there are life lessons. Managing the fatigue of travel … navigating different spaces that aren’t like home.
“Getting along with the family when you’ve been trapped together for so long.”
English said working with schools was important to ask what students would miss, but talking to your children was also important.
“If they’re in year 11 or year 12, or even in year 9 or 10, they might have a lot of concerns about missing out and getting behind.
“In year 11 and 12 there might be issues with taking them out during QCE exams, so that will need to be factored into your decision.”
Like the Allard family, many chose home-schooling to allow flexibility when travelling, and since 2013, home-schooling numbers have skyrocketed by 807 per cent.
Freedom, flexibility and the ability to travel were common themes among the thousands of submissions objecting to the state government’s proposed, and then dumped, changes to home-schooling.