Taking children out of school for holidays damages their future prospects

Why do parents do it? To gain cheaper holidays will probably be the most obvious reason with the fines, issued by local authorities, being too low to make a difference. That government finds it necessary to impose fines at all for taking children out of school is so very sad.

So it’s all about money it would seem

We only have one childhood and one chance to be at school and often parents will fight to get their children into what they think are the best schools. Yet some of the parents, who have done such fighting, will then take their children out of the school they picked, outside of school holidays, and in doing so seemingly be prepared to risk the downside of their children missing out on lessons. This is an odd contradiction to me; surely the point of getting your children into the best possible school should mean you want them to be there as much as possible, excepting illness of course.

I’ve heard the ‘reasons’ for family holidays outside of normal school holiday weeks. Obviously money is the biggest one, but I’ve heard people say it enables important family memories to be made or that the children will soon catch up on the missed schooling. I take ‘memories’ to be a rather poor excuse but the catching up one deserves some consideration.

Children will soon catch up?

Firstly, I would suggest that for all but the brightest of children catching up will be a challenge as schools teach to a curriculum which fits the school year, so missing one or two weeks should be looked upon as, at best, a challenge and, at worst, putting a child’s education on the back foot. But isn’t there a knock on challenge for schools and teachers? Don’t they have to try to address the missing weeks in a child’s education to give them an opportunity to catch up? Tough enough when a child has missed school because of illness but surely not a sensible additional pressure on our schools/education system when creating obviously avoidable absences.

Surely the fact that government found it necessary to bring in fines for unauthorised absences is evidence enough that missing schooling is a problem which needs to be avoided? The fact that the fines are too low to stop it is an issue which government needs to revisit.

The problem as I see it is one of parents wanting cheaper holidays and then convincing themselves that it will not be a big issue for their children. The fact is that for other than the brightest of children it will be an issue.

I don’t recall ever being taken out of school for a holiday and my Dad managed Thomas Cook travel agent shops so could probably access cheaper holiday deals more easily than most folks. We did not take our youngster out of school for holidays either, I might add.

Doing it because others do?

My final thought on this knotty issue is that once families look at other families doing it they see it as acceptable so do it too. The bottom line is that children don’t gain an education whilst they’re away from school and surely we all want youngsters to have the best education possible. On that basis there are no good reasons but there are excuses which some parents can comfort themselves with and even use to try to justify what seems to me as the indefensible.

Children need to be in school