Looking forward to family half-term, I hope? Retrieving your children from the jaws of the system? Kids, happy to be out of the rat-race, sleep late, chillax? Or does it get boring? For all its loveliness, home can be cramping and lonely after the perpetual-motion of the school day. Especially when mum and dad both work. But happy or not at school, everyone needs a break.
The trouble is that if you need another one, and miss one of the state’s prescribed 40 weeks of on-site education, your parents are in trouble. Even a couple of days’ “unauthorised absence” means a fine of £60 per child, doubling after 21 days; 28 days unpaid means a court appearance, up to £1,000 and a criminal record. In “exceptional circumstances” and in advance a head teacher may give permission for such dereliction.
It has to involve rehabilitation from trauma, a parent in the forces who gets no leave in school holidays, death or terminal illness of a close relative, and some weddings. You must present evidence in writing, and even so there are days when heads are urged to refuse any exceptions at all.
Schools jumped on the rule, not only in the critical GCSE period: in the first term after the coalition government tightened the rules in 2013, a quarter of primary schools (children aged five to 11) imposed the fines. It’s the law.
Except, apparently, it isn’t. Jon Platt took his seven-year-old daughter to Florida in April, the only time 17 family members could all be together. She missed five days. The fine was imposed, but Mr Platt refused to pay. It rose to £120. He still refused. The local authority threatened prosecution.
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Calmly, because unlike most he is a man who can afford lawyers, he explained that Section 444 of the Education Act only stipulates that parents (unless home-educating) must make children attend school “regularly”. His daughter’s attendance record is strong: at the time the head teacher refused the request it was 100 per cent. He regarded the bonding family adventure as useful. “I cannot,” he said, “allow a local education authority to tell me what is right for my kids. Frankly, parents need to decide for themselves.”
Mr Platt won: Isle of Wight magistrates said there was no case to answer. He speaks highly of the head teacher “just doing her job”, but has kicked an embarrassing hole in the system. Magistrates’ decisions do not bind other courts, but the Department for Education is braced for challenges. Its best hope is that most parents in parallel cases can’t afford to do a Platt and hire lawyers more expensive than the actual fine. Most typical absences, indeed, happen because of tight budgets and the travel industry’s sneaky habit of raising prices sharply in the 12 weeks of school holidays.
To smear all term-time absences as irresponsible holidaymaking is unfair, though. There are cases of parents fined for absences many would consider loving and decent. A couple in Lancashire paid £650 for taking their children to see ill grandparents in India; another left a day early at the end of summer term to see a dying grandmother. A woman with MS wanted her last able-bodied holiday with children as her condition worsened. A family doubly bereaved were offered a cheap cottage for a week and took it for “time to recover together”. Parents of an autistic boy took a low-season trip to “castles and historic buildings” because large crowds distress him. A holiday company employee explained that she never, obviously, gets time off in school holidays, so took her six year old out for five days.
A few authorities take a gentler view. Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire decided this year only to enforce fixed penalties when the child’s attendance record was poor, and to work constructively with truant families. Looking in dismay at the Platt case, others may follow.
It will not please the education secretary, who speaks furiously of “busting the myth” that absences don’t necessarily destroy a future. DfE figures do indeed show that pupils with no absences in the two years before GCSEs (age 14-16) get better grades than those who miss a week a year, and far better those who miss two. But it does not specify reasons, and may be lumping in the careful family decisions with troubled truancy. Nor can I find any solid evidence that young primary children have, as Nicky Morgan said, their “life chances” ruined by the odd absence. In easier times we whipped our five-year-old out for a whole term to sail round Britain, with no educational detriment.
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We all know children who did fine after missing some school through illness, house moves, strikes or snow. Around 3,700 children a year meet autumn with no primary school place at all, and suffer delay before education starts.
Of course there are great frustrations for schools when parents repeatedly place foreign holidays over the final journey towards examinations. Schools are under the cosh, with league tables and targets and naming-and-shaming and a “failing” label imposed with little consideration of the social difficulties of their intake. Of course it is not kind of a parent to endanger a 15-year-old’s wobbly understanding of an exam subject for a frivolous trip; of course some parents are too dim to see that unless threatened with fines. But there is a salty, fierce common sense in the magistrates’ assertion that Mr Platt had a right to value a family bond higher than an extra week of Roger Red-Hat and number-work.