Should parents be allowed to take kids out of school for a holiday?

alwayslate_2

Not everyone can get school holidays, I am 17th on my holiday list at work with only 2 people allowed off at any time almost impossible to get. We have priced 2 weeks in Florida next year and can go in May for £2000 less than the school summer holidays!! how can the tour operators justify this. The goverment should take this on and sort the prices out and then most of the in term holidays would stop.

lostinrates

Maybe under the financial education in schools MSE has campaigned for we can hope for some explanation of pricing including peak pricing and supply and demand. Hopefully children not on holiday for those weeks might be able to explain those concepts and the limitations of our government on other country's decisions too.

Sunflower1

I have to say when i was in my last year of gcse's i went on a month long holiday and it was in no way detrimental to my exam grades. So possibly it depends on the child; but we have just booked a holiday and our child will miss the last 7 days of the summer term; to go in the summer hols would be an extra £2000 and that price change is effective for the last week of school. Do I think this is going to affect my 6 year old in anyway - personally no; would it affect my child if they were struggling in school - yes probably! But last year my child did very little in the last 5 days of school so i don't think this will be detrimental to their learning in the grand scheme of things...but i can see why schools do not advocate this and yet i am still going ahead with a holiday in school time. A difficult one i think

owlthomas

I completely understand why parents wish to take their children out of school to go on holiday. The travel industry charge grossly inflated and disgustingly unaffordable prices during the school holidays. I am a parent of two school-age children and I also work 4 days a week as a Secondary school teacher. I will be honest and tell all parents, that if your children are in Year 10 or above, really think long and hard about taking your children out of school for a holiday and for goodness sake DO NOT book it for May or June. Children missing GCSE/A'level exams or controlled assessments is a real problem. If your child is studying a BTEC subject, then the problem is even worse as this work has strict time-limits and deadlines.

On the other hand, I have NO CHOICE but to take holidays during the school holidays and as a result, I rarely get a holiday away from home. To illustrate this, I have never been on holiday outside of Northern Europe - in my lifetime (almost 40 years) I have been on holiday outside of the UK, THREE times. Why? because I can't afford it. My husband was made redundant from the RAF and has set up his own business which is in its second year. Money is very tight and although I try to earn extra money by marking exam papers, we still cannot afford a family holiday without 'clubbing together' with a friend and that's just for the UK.

Am I a whiney teacher with long holidays? Yes, but please remember that the vast majority of teachers spend their evenings and some of the days in their holidays catching-up with all the work that they don't have time for in the school day! I object to having had a three year pay freeze and still have to pay over the odds to have a holiday while people happily take their children out of school (and sometimes compromise their education). If the holiday industry applied FAIR PRICING, we could all have an affordable holiday without complaint or our children missing out.

I'm off to catch-up with some marking on my day off now.

Indie_Kid

Sunflower1 wrote: »

I have to say when i was in my last year of gcse's i went on a month long holiday and it was in no way detrimental to my exam grades.

You're lucky then. I was off for 3 weeks in year 11 around January due to needing some surgery and this really affected my grades. I asked a few teachers what I'd missed (I wasn't asking for them to go over the work for me) and was told not to worry about it.:mad: At the same time, I was told off for taking this amount of time off. I had no choice in this.

Someone earlier on, mentioned the human rights act. Where in the HRA does it say that children need a holiday abroad? Maybe I'm not looking hard enough; but I can't see anything of the sort.

Is there any reason why people aren't lobbying the holiday companies to lower their prices during holidays?

robin_banks

sh1305 wrote: »

You're lucky then. I was off for 3 weeks in year 11 around January due to needing some surgery and this really affected my grades. I asked a few teachers what I'd missed (I wasn't asking for them to go over the work for me) and was told not to worry about it.:mad: At the same time, I was told off for taking this amount of time off. I had no choice in this.

Someone earlier on, mentioned the human rights act. Where in the HRA does it say that children need a holiday abroad? Maybe I'm not looking hard enough; but I can't see anything of the sort.

Is there any reason why people aren't lobbying the holiday companies to lower their prices during holidays?

It's supply and demand innit?

one2escape

The difference in price between school holiday time and when the children are in school is just staggering. It can double and sometimes triple the price of the holiday. It is a balancing act. We have only had one family holiday abroad in the last 8 years and we took the kids out of school to do it. We did, which seems to becoming more popular, is over a half term. The prices are slightly dearer than non peak and they only miss one week of term but this was the only time we could afford to go. Holidays are needed for everyone and that is what creates memories and bonds families together.

Indie_Kid

one2escape wrote: »

The difference in price between school holiday time and when the children are in school is just staggering. It can double and sometimes triple the price of the holiday. It is a balancing act. We have only had one family holiday abroad in the last 8 years and we took the kids out of school to do it. We did, which seems to becoming more popular, is over a half term. The prices are slightly dearer than non peak and they only miss one week of term but this was the only time we could afford to go. Holidays are needed for everyone and that is what creates memories and bonds families together.

Foreign holidays aren't needed. What's wrong with going away for the weekend or whatever, instead of splashing out on some really expensive holiday?

zagubov

I hope my memory is playing tricks on me about this, but I seem to remember reading not so long ago about holiday companies cutting back on the rooms and dates they were offering, in order to create an artificial scarcity to justify higher prices. Sort of a hotel cartel.

This was in response to increasing numbers of holidaymakers bypassing travel agents to book rooms themselves and cutting down on the overall spend and driving down profits in the whole travel industry.

Don't blame the government - this is a situation where a market isn't working.

As regards taking time off for a holiday; teachers have enough to do trying to help students catch up when they have been off sick. Healthy students taking time off just makes it more difficult still.

Galaxy68

norfolkmum wrote: »

I always took mine out of school for a week's holiday (only in the UK, still couldn't afford abroad even out of season). I always booked it away from exams or anything important, the head teacher even said to me that they would learn more in a week's holiday than they would in a month at school. They learn other things on a holiday, just as important as academic work. There would have been no way we could have had any sort of holiday in the school break.


My daughter is now going to a top university also, and got all As and A*s in her exams. My other 2 children are headed the same way.

In a class of 35, if everyone took their child out for 1 week, then virtually a whole school year is lost to the 1 week holiday. This must have an impact on the class as a whole. If everyone did as you did then the whole class is going to suffer.
We coudn't afford a holiday for a lot of years but we had weekends away or day trips out and yes these cost the same as your one week away in term time but I never considered removing my children from school. Education should be considered a privilege and not a right.