A question about keeping children off school in term time: to take them on holiday.

peachyprice

onlyroz wrote: »

Wouldn't that come under "exceptional circumstances"?

Yes, it would.

FBaby

t's nothing like breastfeeding / bottle feeding. To me that is like a state ed / home ed choice, or any other choice made. It's just that, its a choice. I don't for one minute feel the right to judge people on their choices.

I understand why you are saying but the point I was trying to make was using the value of 'statitics' to make a point about individual circumstances.

Statistics show that children with attendance of less than 95% come out with at least one grade lower in their GCSEs than children who attend 95% of the time or more. It literally only takes a few days of illness here and there for attendance to go below that figure.

This affirmation is incorrect because it forgets to stipulate 'on average' and leads to believe that any child with an attendance below 95% has a lower grade than those with an attendance of 95% and of course, we know this is not the case.

So whereas for statistical reporting, the school will be considered encouraging its pupils to get higher GCSE results, it doesn't mean that if Jo Blogs is absent for 94% of the time this year, he will get a C grade when he was predicted a a B grade at the start of the year.

I do understand the importance of attendance for the school, where I disagree is the assumption made of the impact on individual pupils.

TBagpuss

mumps wrote: »

My husband was a police officer, he couldn't always get his holidays in the school summer holiday. Do you really want police, fire service, NHS etc to let staff numbers fall below safe levels or should essential workers with school age children not be allowed to have family holidays. Obviously not all will have children but often the people on the front line are of an age where it is likely they will have children, then you have the police officer, fireman, nurse, doctor who doesn't have children but is married to a teacher. We had to take holidays in termtime some years or not have a family holiday. Nothing to do with wanting a cheap holiday, wanting to go abroad or anything else other than a man who was working hard, risking his life/health for the public (ultimately injured in the course of duty and disabled for over 20 years) and wanting two weeks away for it all with his family. My kids all went to university, all got firsts and all doing well so it wasn't the ruin of their education.

I think the problem is that you have to have rules which apply to all of the children.

Intelligent, academic children who work hard and have supportive parents will do well even if they have time off.

Children with little support at home, who are less academically able and who find school work more of a challenge are going to suffer much more of a set back if they miss a week or two.

But any school which tried to restrict permission to go away using that kind of criteria would be in a hugely difficult position.Such a position would almost certainly be seen as discriminatory (and could be legally discriminatory, in relation to any child with a learning disability, for instance)

Also, children are taught in classes. Having children out of the classroom may not only affect the child who is on holiday, but also the ones who are not - if the teacher is having to play catch-up and re-cover old ground to get the missing child up to speed on their return, then they will have less time to give to the rest of the class.

I personally would like schools to have a little more discretion than they currently have, but I do think that, as a general rule, it is better for children not to be taken out of school.

I think in most cases, even those who have limited choice about their holidays, such as the groups you mention, can find some periods in the 13 weeks of school holidays to take time off. It may not always be the weeks you would prefer, and there may be some years in the lives of your children where the relevant parent can't get time off (just as there may be years when a parent has to work on Christmas Day, or New Years Eve) but that's no different to the fact that teachers can't take holidays in term time - it's part and parcel of working that particular job.

Jagraf

fbaby - i'm a bit confused. The stats will be two sets of averages / comparables. A bit like saying women live an average of X number of years more than men do. Doesn't mean every man dies at a certain age, some will live longer than women, some will die much younger. Of course, that's the nature of averages.

Unless I'm missing what you're saying.

The statistics show that, on average, the bar is down one grade for less than 95% attendance.

Alikay

I don't really understand why anyone would want to take their kids out of school for a holiday unless they had no option (apart from maybe tagging an extra day or two onto a half-term to take account of non-weekend flights). If you're a working parent it's hard enough to cover the existing school holidays with annual leave, without finding additional leave to take a term-time holiday too, and if you're a stay-at-home parent isn't it nice to break up the big summer holidays with a week away? Most resorts and hotels are much more geared up to entertaining kids and teens in the school holidays and there are likely to be other children around for them to pal up with.

System

My experience was that although not encouraged, it was tolerated *going back to the 90's here). I missed my SATS in year 6 as my family took us to Greece for a holiday. Did it have any impact on my schooling? Not really. In fact when i got back off holiday i gave a presentation on ancient Greece based on the things we'd seen and done out there. (We were doing Ancient Greece in history). That was in primary school though, i don;t think we took time off during secondary school (in fact i had 100% attendance for the first 3 years)

mumps

TBagpuss wrote: »

I think the problem is that you have to have rules which apply to all of the children.

Intelligent, academic children who work hard and have supportive parents will do well even if they have time off.

Children with little support at home, who are less academically able and who find school work more of a challenge are going to suffer much more of a set back if they miss a week or two.

But any school which tried to restrict permission to go away using that kind of criteria would be in a hugely difficult position.Such a position would almost certainly be seen as discriminatory (and could be legally discriminatory, in relation to any child with a learning disability, for instance)

Also, children are taught in classes. Having children out of the classroom may not only affect the child who is on holiday, but also the ones who are not - if the teacher is having to play catch-up and re-cover old ground to get the missing child up to speed on their return, then they will have less time to give to the rest of the class.

I personally would like schools to have a little more discretion than they currently have, but I do think that, as a general rule, it is better for children not to be taken out of school.

I think in most cases, even those who have limited choice about their holidays, such as the groups you mention, can find some periods in the 13 weeks of school holidays to take time off. It may not always be the weeks you would prefer, and there may be some years in the lives of your children where the relevant parent can't get time off (just as there may be years when a parent has to work on Christmas Day, or New Years Eve) but that's no different to the fact that teachers can't take holidays in term time - it's part and parcel of working that particular job.

I have 4 kids and by the time the youngest left school the eldest was 39 so from the eldest starting school to the youngest leaving would have been possibly 34 years without a family holiday, not just part and parcel of the job and if you want people to do essential jobs, work Christmas Day and New Years Day, yes my husband did plenty of that as well, then you need to give a bit. We always had camping holidays and maybe I'm soft but a camping holiday at the English seaside in the February half term just doesn't do it for me.

Personally I have no regrets about taking my kids out of school the years that we had to. The youngest 2 missed the first 4 years at school and it didn't damage their education so I can't imagine a fortnight is actually a problem. I never knew a teacher to go over what my kids missed because of taking holidays, they were expected to find out what they had missed and catch up when the were older and as for key stage 1 everything gets repeated over and over again from what I see.

I often wonder how people like Tom Daley got time off, plenty of young sporting stars seem to be able to take weeks off. Even when the play for school teams they sometimes go off on tours, our local school did a rugby tour of South Africa last year. It didn't seem to be a problem.

mumps

onlyroz wrote: »

Wouldn't that come under "exceptional circumstances"?

peachyprice wrote: »

Yes, it would.

So would it have less impact on the child's education if it was exceptional circumstances rather than any other reason? I don't think so.

Angry_Bear

Cash-Cows wrote: »

If the fines were made say £200 per child per parent then taking children out wouldn't take place. Too many parents are just taking the hit so the current fines are obviously not high enough.

maman wrote: »

...
So because appealing to parents sense of responsibility failed Gove decided to be more punitive about it, introduced fines and made schools police it.

Interestingly (possibly), there has been previous research that suggest this sort of fining system - particularly if the fines aren't high enough - can be counter productive.
When the pressure to have holidays (or do X) is down to peer pressure and expected behaviour, people are more likely to comply. By adding a fine, some people will pay the fine and see this as "buying permission" to break the expected standard of behaviour.

Here's one example talking about putting fines on parent picking their kids up late from daycare: http://freakonomics.com/2013/10/23/what-makes-people-do-what-they-do/

onlyroz

mumps wrote: »

So would it have less impact on the child's education if it was exceptional circumstances rather than any other reason? I don't think so.

Of course not. But there's a difference between a family unable to book annual leave during the school holidays and a family who just want a cheap week in the sun.