Should you be fined for taking your children on holiday during UK term time?

With the cost of travel escalating during school holidays, many parents want to take kids away during UK term time, risking a £60 fine. Secondary school teacher Pavlos Anastasi told loveMONEY why that’s a bad idea.

Many parents are willing to risk fines for taking their kids out of school during term time, for good reason.

Travel and accommodation prices during the official summer holidays increase to such an extent that many families are unable to afford a holiday at all, warned writer Felicity Hannah in an article last week.

She believes that parents should be able to take their kids on holiday during term time, without getting fined, and just over half of loveMONEY readers agree:

This was a deeply divisive topic, however, with some readers warning about the danger to children’s’ education.

What is the fine for taking kids out of school?

You could get fined £60 if you take your child out of school during term time, without the head teacher's permission.

That rises to £120 if you don't pay within 21 days. Check your local council's website for their specific rules.

Whilst you could easily make up for both fines with savings on flights and accommodation, there can be more serious consequences for breaking the rules.

These could include court-ordered parenting classes or even prosecution leading to a fine of up to £2,500.

A teacher's view on term-time holidays

To explore the issue further, we turned to teacher Pavlos Anastasi, who is Head of Year 10 at Frederick Bremer School in Walthamstow, north London:

Education education education...except when you fancy a holiday!

I’ll begin by confessing my bias. I’m a teacher and a Head of Year and I also think that the school holidays are unfair on the majority of people.

However, when I'm asked by parents to let their kids go on holiday during term time it's very difficult for me to say yes.

Teaching is a hard job. I know we get the holidays, but it is. We are held to account not for our own performance but for the performance of children, with our pay, mortgages and livelihoods at risk if they don’t meet their target grades!

In this context and climate, two weeks off at Christmas isn’t just the difference between a Grade 4 and 5 but could thus be the difference between affording a month’s rent or not.

One of my ‘performance targets’ is to ensure that attendance in my year group remains at 96% and over.

Of course, let’s not even begin on the hours required to ensure that student is caught up to meet their target grade. It’s all very well saying that allowing students to take time off is ‘preparing them for the real world’, but this has consequences for others too.

It’s all very well for parents to tell me they’re taking their child away for 10 days before the Easter holidays so they avoid the rush, but this has bigger consequences beyond getting a decent tan.

Unfortunately, the limitations of the school holidays mean that teachers, parents and children are forced to go abroad during those ‘set in stone’ dates, and of course, Mr Ryanair and Madame EasyJet are going to raise their prices.

Rather than blaming schools and local authorities for attempting to prioritise our children’s education, let’s instead shift the focus of our attention and anger towards travel companies who can raise prices and exploit term times in the knowledge that their bottom line is the only thing that will be making ‘expected levels of progress’.

Having read Felicity’s opinion piece where she bemoaned the stresses of school, stressing that ‘it is perfectly justified for all parents to want to claw back a bit of time from the demands of school’, I snorted into my morning cereal.

How selfish. What message does this send to students? ‘I want to be engaged...however, it means that I give up a lot of my time managing school tasks.’ Yet it would appear perfectly reasonable to expect this from hard-working teachers without any respite.

The author is correct - school does bleed relentlessly into home life but telling students and parents that they can take time off when they feel like it without any consequences merely tells students that education doesn’t matter anyway and that there are more important things to focus on, namely which mocktail to order by the beach of a Spanish hotel.

Look, I get it. Holidays are expensive and school holidays are restrictive. It’s not fair that the same fights cost five times more just because they happen to fall during school holidays, and as I said at the start, the holidays are unfair on the majority of people.

Life also comes along and makes plans for you which requires us to take time off during term time.

However, allowing parents to take their children out of school for a holiday without consequences does nothing for the student’s education, unduly pressures the education system on their return and sends the message out that education does not matter.

Once that message has been learned by a student, it isn’t the parent who has to deal with the apathy, rudeness and lack of engagement in class. It’s the teacher.

Do you agree with Pavlos? Please vote in our poll and click here to re-read Felicity Hannah’s original article