The powers that be really don’t like plucky proles who stand up for themselves.
A High Court ruling backing a parent who refused to pay a fine for taking his child on holiday in term time will cause “huge confusion”, an MP has said.
Education select committee chairman Neil Carmichael said parents would be “wondering what to do” after Friday’s ruling, and would need clarity.
Only if they have had a lobotomy. This ruling was not in place when I was growing up and parents weren’t confused. What this ruling means is that spiteful local authorities and headteachers may not fine parents for taking a child out of school for a couple of weeks. This is a reasonable ruling. That it even got this far tells us much about the creeping authoritarianism in this country, whereby nasty little apparatchiks in schools and local authorities seek to impose power over us.
The amount of parents taking children on term-time holidays has always been minimal. It was never a problem that didn’t need fixing.
Of course, having had their noses bloodied, revenge in the form of draconian law is but a matter of time. Scum, the lot of them.
I think that Carmicahel may actually be thick. He was one of the morons who actively supported banning smoking in cars with children present, perhaps the most ridiculous public health law of recent times although I admit that there are many other contenders.
Any decent government would remember that it is there to serve the people, take note of public opinion and, if it wanted to make a point about school attendance, take a position based on overall attendance.
As we don’t have decent government it will instead, as you mention seek to prevent judges displaying the compassion, common sense and intellectual capacity that it so sorely lacks.
Thick scum the lot of them.
I have always thought that a strong desire to seek public office should be grounds for disqualification.
Absolutely.
As should having a PPE degree.
The one to blame here is Ofsted, who are putting pressure on heads to achieve unrealistic levels of attendance.
Ofsted are scum, too.
When I was in school in the sixties and seventies it was common for parents to book holidays during term time. The schools had a form that you had to take home for your parents to fill in and sign. Obviously my education was ruined by this practice.
In this case it would seem that the law was drafted sensibly and, if it had been applied properly, would have only targeted parents that were allowing their kids to regularly miss school. I have heard it suggested that school attendance should be voluntary but if you don’t go you should be made to live with the consequences.
How time change!
Back in the early sixties, in Bristol, sixth formers were encouraged to take a week off at the end of the Autmn term to work as a Christmas postman …
Also, if parents are to be fined for depriving children of even a single day of vital education, why not schools when they close due to “bad weather” (as they did not in 1963), or teachers when they go on strike or the Goverment when they close a school for use as a Polling Station, or the Government again when they close the school for an Inset Day?
Schools are silly in this. There is no need for heavy-handed legislation, or indeed any kind of fining system. If they really feel strongly enough about this (as this school seems to), they could stop much term-time absenteeism in its tracks, simply by making parents sign a disclaimer accepting total responsibility for any future educational failings which might accrue to their child having missed that particular period of term-time school. In it they could then make it very clear to those parents that under these circumstances neither the school nor any member of school staff will be under any obligation whatsoever to give any extra help/assistance/time to the child to help them to catch up – that will be down to the parents.
Parents would thus retain the right to take their children on holiday at any time they wish, but one of the reasons frequently cited for doing so (financial) would effectively cease to exist – as the cost of forking out for a private tutor every evening for a month or so to cover lost ground may well erase any savings made by taking an off-peak holiday. Those whose reasons are not financial and who are taking their children out of school during term-time for time-convenience and/or “cultural enrichment” type holidays which can’t be taken at any other time would still be able to do so.
So parents’ rights would remain intact, as they should, but they would come with associated responsibilities, as they also should, but currently don’t. From my experience of many parents, my guess is that, when faced with the possibility that their child may be disadvantaged, and that, if so, they, and not the school, will be responsible for picking up the slack, the idea of a term-time family vacation will become suddenly less appealing. And if not – well, that’s fine, too.
Realistically, that won’t happen nor will it need to. Travel broadens the mind and a couple of weeks in a foreign clime will do more than a few geography lessons – or, for that matter history, depending on where they go. This is a storm in a teacup, the state flexing its muscles because it can. There is no detriment to education here.
Depends on the foreign clime. When my mother was a governor of her local school, she once asked a pupil who told her they went to Disneyland for a holiday which one they meant.
The child had no idea there was more than one, or of which country they’d visited (turned out to be Florida).
Yeah, but some people will never be educated, no matter how much you try. What one of my colleagues calls the GNI (God never intended).
“Realistically, that won’t happen nor will it need to.”
Well, actually, it might, thanks to the wretched National Curriculum. It’s great for youngsters to go off to a foreign clime and learn (for example) all about the ancient Greeks and their history and their way of life and how the two mesh together and all the influences which have shaped their society today, but if in the process they miss out on the classes which are teaching them (for example) about the rise of the British Empire and the effect that that had on India and Africa and the far and middle east and how that has shaped society, politics and economics in those countries, then there would be some catching-up to be done.
But that would be part of the negotiation between the parents and the school – if the PTB have decided (again, using in this example) to include the study of ancient Greece as part of the NC then the family holiday would be every bit as beneficial as any school-organised trip might be. But if not, how is any child going to apply their new-found knowledge of the building of the Acropolis to the power wielded by the East India Company in its heyday?
I’m not saying that parents shouldn’t be able to take their children on holiday whenever they want, I’m just saying that they shouldn’t pretend to themselves that in doing so there won’t possibly be practical consequences of their doing it, because the impression I get is that most of them seem to be totally unable (or unwilling, maybe?) to comprehend that this might be the case. And not to consider that as even the remotest possibility, I feel, does a disservice to their children.
Did you go to school, Jax? The notion that missing a day’s school is irreversibly detrimental to a child’s education is utter tripe. If so, sickly kids would be doomed and all parents could sue teachers who go on strike. The amount of time children can afford to have off depends on the child. I had the first week of every school year off in primary school. I’ve gone from council house to having a doctorate and being a millionaire. We have four children, we’ve taken them out of school as we’ve felt appropriate. So far we’ve only had first class degrees, with one doctorate and another on the way. We haven’t paid a cent for private tuition.
The simple reality is that, for most school systems around the world, only the last couple of years actually count. Even then, daily attendance is far from essential.
Parents are more than happy to accept responsibility for their children’s education, the state is not prepared to let them.
Of course a day out of school here and there isn’t going to be a problem. I’m talking here about a couple of weeks or more in a block. And I certainly don’t think (and didn’t say) that any difficulties would be “irreversibly detrimental.” I was just pointing out that depending on the child (as you say) and the timing (which you didn’t), there could possibly be some problems which would need to be addressed – why do you react like that’s such an unreasonable thing to say? Well done you for doing so well from your education and well done to your children, too, for doing the same, but I’ll bet that whenever you did want to take them out of school for a holiday, if the teacher had called and said to you “Is there no way you could take them out a couple of weeks later, rather than [whenever], because they’ll miss …..” and had explained why it was an important time, you would have gladly rearranged things so that they didn’t miss anything vital. Yes? Well, there you are then – it’s all about negotiation. Maybe you timed things so you never had to get that call, but I would imagine that as a responsible parent, had you received it, you would have reacted sensibly to it and at least considered ways round the problem. Again, all pretty reasonable stuff. So why the spiky reaction?
You’d have lost your bet, Jax. We informed the school when we were taking our children out of school, we never asked. When they were in higher school, we did suggest to our children that they ask their teachers if there was any work they should take with them. We were happy to trust our children as we had instilled in them a love of learning and an appreciation of the value of a good education. This meant that they could be relied on to do what was best for their own education with support but no coercion from us. Our youngest daughter was self-driven to outshine her siblings and also to win a subject prize so our role was to make sure that she got enough rest and relaxation.
Your suggested remedy would require heavy handed legislation in order to empower schools to have the disclaimer signed. We never signed a Home-School Agreement, we sent a letter explaining our libertarian based objections and said that we expected that to be an end to the matter.
No problem. If we ever meet, I’ll stump up a tenner. Although, in fairness, I never suggested that you “asked” the school, because I wouldn’t dream that you would ever do such a thing. I assumed (correctly, as it turns out) that you simply “informed” them, and then away you all went. But, hey, I’m still interested in the answer to the question “what if?” Because, of course, that call from the teacher could very well have come, even if they’d simply been “informed,” if they really felt that the timing was bad. “Informing” a school of something doesn’t bar them from making contact, no matter how unwelcome that might be. I realise that it’s a hypothetical question for you, as it never actually happened, but as a doctor, I’m sure that a little hypothetical question like this isn’t hard to answer. Would your response have been “OK, then, we’ll do it in a few weeks’ time when it’s less of a problem,” or would it have been “Get lost. We decide when we have our holidays, not you.” Or would it have been something in between? As I say, I’m just curious …
And, goodness me, I certainly wouldn’t recommend that legislation be involved in any such disclaimer because you and I both know that politicians wouldn’t be able to resist tinkering with the actual disclaimer itself, which would miss the whole point. Legislation wouldn’t be necessary if schools were empowered to turn down children whose parents refused to sign, and parents would be free to choose another school with policies that they liked better. The private school system works perfectly well using a very similar system, albeit in recent years this has been rather more along the lines of a formal contract. But each school’s contract differs ever so slightly to ensure that it suits the needs of the establishment and the children within it, so parents have more choice. The State school system could do a lot worse than to adopt a similar system.
Oh, and one last thing I’m curious about (as you can see, I’m the curious type), when you refer to “higher school,” I’m not sure what you mean exactly. GCSEs? Pre-GCSE years? A-levels?
‘Education select committee chairman Neil Carmichael said parents would be “wondering what to do” after Friday’s ruling, and would need clarity.’
Reading the article suggests it’s the *schools* that need “clarification” — hence the court case — not the parents. The parents seem to be taking their kids out of school just fine.
Last time I checked, civil servants are still supposed to serve *us*, not vice-versa, so if there is truly an issue with the law’s clarity on the parent-school interface, getting the High Court to make a ruling is a good solution.
If there’s a legal issue that is unclear, then (a) the law needs to be suitably clarified, and (b) those responsible for drafting the said unclear law need to be punished for their gross incompetence, given that drafting laws that are intelligible and understandable by the laypeople who are expected to abide by them is their fucking *job*.
Perhaps the answer is to dump the current school term system and run them open for 48 weeks per year. All parental holidays could just be accommodated within the longer year.
Oh course that would mean teachers running classes for 48 instead of 36 weeks per year but who cares about that? Most hardworking Britons will think it’s about time…
Get 100% in your exams, get 10 days holiday. Get 90% in your exams, get 9 days holiday, and so on.
An on going local scenario is a couple who, for their child to be accepted at that school, were asked to sign a contract that they would not take their child out of school during term time. The parents added a codicil that the school wouldn’t adversely affect the education of their child by taking inset days during term time, either at the beginning or end of a term, and that the teachers would not take any industrial action which would interfere in the continual education of their child. Both parents signed the document, handed it back to the head teacher and requested that their copy of the contract, signed by all parties, be posted to them. They are still waiting. Meanwhile their child has been accepted by that school.