Perhaps it’s my stage of parenthood, or the fact that I’ve been lying awake at night, but I think I have an idea that could secure the electoral future of the Labour party. All Andy Burnham needs to do to win a landslide at the next general election is abolish fines for parents who take their children on term-time holidays. More than 2 million – around a fifth – have taken their children out of school because they could not afford to travel during holidays, according to a national survey released this month. A record 459,288 fines were issued to parents last year.
This issue has recently become relevant to me because my son starts school in September, so this year will be the last in which we will be allowed to take term-time trips. Obviously, as I contemplate the preposterous costs for summer holidays, I have developed a new and vested interest in being able to get away with my family. It’s deeper than that, though: I didn’t get many childhood holidays, for financial and circumstantial reasons. As a result I feel very passionately that all small people need leisure time away. Without wanting to turn this into a big sob story, I was so desperate to go on holiday like my friends that I used to collect brochures from high street travel agents and spend hours poring over the different hotels, with kids’ clubs, beaches, swimming pools and waterslides that I could only dream of.
Living in a wealthy middle-class area has further radicalised me. I have heard enough parents casually admit that they simply incorporate the fine into their budget to understand that a two-tier system exists. Fines for term-time holidays discriminate unfairly against low-income and Send families, who for the aforementioned financial and circumstantial reasons (too expensive, too crowded for children with sensory or mobility issues) will struggle to take their children away at peak times or cover the fines for doing so in term time. Handing out fines also discriminates against people who work in certain professions, such as farmers, members of the military or people who work in the leisure and tourism industry, and those who have family living a great distance away.
Also, fines don’t even work. Taking your child out of school for a holiday is an ongoing act of mass civil disobedience on the part of the public in England and Wales (Scotland and Northern Ireland do not have automatic fines). Considering how law-abiding we generally are, I find this quite extraordinary. It implies there is a passionate and significant proportion of the public who believe in the importance and the value of a family holiday to the extent that they are willing to break the law to give their kids one. I also suspect many find the rules off-puttingly paternalistic (even as a socialist who loves the “nanny state”, I consider it a huge overreach).
Of course, there are inevitably people who get very exercised about everyone following the rules. These objectors think you should simply plan your holidays around the school calendar, and if you can’t afford to go anywhere, tough. I have met people in real life who have said this in conversation, and they are always the sorts who take their children on gastronomic cycling tours of the Dordogne every summer. In other words, they have a certain level of privilege and don’t seem able to make the imaginative leap to barely being able to scrape together enough cash for a few rainy days in a caravan near Prestatyn.
Don’t get me wrong: there are reasonable objections to my proposition. School attendance and its impact on education is an important issue – I fundamentally believe that. What I don’t believe is that schools should be such a high-pressure environment that one term-time holiday a year – which would still need to be authorised at the headteacher’s discretion – will always have a disastrous impact on learning. With school refusals at record highs and a crumbling Send system, term-time holidays are clearly not the most urgent cause of poor educational outcomes. The coalition government did much to damage the state education system. It also, incidentally, made the system for unauthorised absences at state schools much more punitive . Many of the politicians responsible were privately educated and went on to send their children to fee-paying schools where parents are free to take their kids on term-time holidays.
If I’ve managed to convince you, perhaps I will risk losing you when I say that I don’t believe these trips even necessarily need to be “educational”. On the few holidays I was taken on, we went to museums and old workhouses and castles and ruins, and yes, it’s beneficial to do that. It’s also good for children to see the worried frowns on their parents’ faces melt away – to socialise, to practise their swimming and eat new foods. Memories of fun and togetherness can last a lifetime, sustaining us through tough times. Value to taxpayers is often mentioned in these discussions, but the wellbeing and mental health benefits for children can be economic as well as holistic.
By all means, also look at other measures, such as penalising travel companies that engage in unreasonable profiteering, and staggering or shortening the summer holidays – and providing proper childcare during them. But this should be an open goal for Burnham. He says he cares about alleviating the cost of living pressures on families, allowing them to enjoy life. Abolishing fines would be one effective way of doing that, while correcting a source of social inequality. And it’s a vote winner.
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