Personally, I’m against parents taking their kids out of school for holidays. Nevertheless, I can certainly understand the temptation, and there’s an awful lot of persuasive rationale involved.
That said, what really annoys me is the part played by travel companies. The school-holiday price hike is accepted as a fact of life, but it’s blatant exploitation. If we’re allowed to have laws that stop parents taking their kids out of school, then why not one that stops this practice?
Thoughts?
Like parking charges, it’s become a cash-cow for local authorities.
I got taken out of my school for a holiday when I was ten, with full authorisation. It didn’t adversely affect my education because, in retrospect, my teacher was f***ing useless anyway.
So did I – went to Cyprus to see my sister stationed out there. My first flight, first holiday, first foreign country, Greek ruins at Salamis, the smell of kebabs – surely more input than I missed at school.
For a few authorities it may be nothing more than a Cash Cow.
For the vast majority I suspect it’s just another rule that’s supposed to be enforced so that’s what they do. The customer-facing people whose job it is to enforce the rules stick rigidly to the letter of them because they are not given authority to allow exceptions. The people above them who do have authority know that allowing exceptions means more work. Enforcement is easy when the rules are set in stone.
Having said that, there are a certain number of irresponsible herberts who’d rather take themselves (and their kids) on cut-price beach-lounging holidays than take an interest in their children’s education. For them, saving money on the holiday package means more cash to spend in gift shops, restaurants and bars. Others with more limited funds are faced with the choice of a cheap, tightly-budgeted holiday during term time or no holiday at all.
The travel and holiday industry is cut-throat to the extreme. Everyone’s trying to undercut each other to keep afloat. Peak seasons (xmas, easter and midsummer) are where they can actually turn a decent profit. The rest of the year they are either just ticking over or making a loss in a buyer’s market. In the summer it becomes a seller’s market and they price their product accordingly.
Hoi!! Wait! “irresponsible herberts” is a phrase I’ve only ever heard my dad use.
Are you my Dad then?
If you aren’t, I have to deal with the idea that my dad is somehow normal.
I am peturb.
I have not knowingly fathered any mooses.
Hope this helps.
Not knowingly? You irresponsible herbert!
PS. You owe me 43 Christmas presents!
I was brung up under the precepts of The Yorkshire Church Of T’ Tight Fist (Soft Shandy-Drinking Soothern Get Division).
We don’t celebrate Birthdays, Christmas or other holidays. We hold hard to our motto “If tha’ does owt fer nowt then do it for thi’sen.”
You escaped 43 years of this. Think yourself lucky!
Well.
I was brought up to believe that my Daddy was a green-eyed mountain jack.
Frankly I always found that improbable.
PS. “Tight fist”… hurrrrr
What makes us more frustrated with this is that, whereby we used to take toys and games in on the last day before Christmas and the last day before the summer holiday, our kids now seem to do no work in the week leading up to the end of every term. They watch DVDs and so forth. So, whilst I disagreed with my wife when she took the kids out for a week to save a considerable amount on going to Australia, they missed little or no actual schoolwork.
Our local council (Barnsley) have been quite cute recently though. By setting the school holidays a week later or earlier than the rest of the country. They were actually going to reduce the summer holidays to 4 weeks and make the half-term breaks 2 weeks, but the teachers objected. But at least having our half-terms later than others means we can get cheaper deals. For example, we all turned Centre Park in the Lake District into a Barnsley satellite town for a week last year.
We shared a cabin with a couple of friends of ours and their kids, so we had three lads from my son’s class in the same cabin, one of whom is, shall we say, a quite challenging kid. We all turned up at the cabin and were unpacking our stuff when the people from the next cabin turned up. It was only their teacher. You should have seen her face drop!
Six or seven years ago the Easter holiday in Hull actually happened before Easter. In other words, schools closed for a fortnight, went back on the Monday… and then closed again for the following Friday and Monday. I think this may have been a similar ruse.
Last year (Mini Paws’ first at school) we received her attendance record for the year a week and a half before the end of term. It was almost as if they were saying “next year you can nip off a bit early if you like. We’ll only be showing DVDs.” So that’s what we’re gonna do.
I don’t see the difference between holiday price hikes and peak/off-peak charges for anything else (gym, trains, phone calls back in the day, whatever), it’s just in the nature of things – I’d prefer it if it wasn’t, but in the end we have a choice to buy or not to buy.
And no, of course the odd week out of school is probably never going to have a long-term impact on one child’s education, but I agree that the thick end of this particular wedge (i.e. parents allowed to take their kids out of school whenever they like) would cause chaos and an undue strain on an already resource-stretched system.
I also find it hard to reconcile the apparently opposite notions of parents who are prepared to even move house to get their kids into the “right” school, vs. those who want to take their kids out of school during term time to save a few quid…
… and most of all I can’t believe this tool went to all this trouble for £120 (I’m admittedly taking a wild guess that for anyone who can afford a family holiday to Florida, £120 won’t be an enormous hardship…)
http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/society/six-year-old-taken-on-term-time-holiday-will-never-catch-up-on-colouring-20160515108831
No longer applicable as my kids no longer at school but when my daughter was and we wanted to take her out of school it was never a problem. We asked politely in advance. One time we went to Patagonia. The head teacher said ‘ she will learn far more from 2 weeks in Patagonia than she will from 2 weeks at school’. Eminently sensible unlike the head of education who was on BBC this morning talking complete bollocks.
In Canada doesn’t seem to be an issue at least up to grade 5 (so far), as long as you just let school people know. The odd few days here and there will make little difference to her education especially as she finds the work so far fairly easy. When leading up to important tests/exams then that is a different matter and some parents won’t really care about that.
So “the state is taking rights away from parents” he claims. What a complete moron. The state educates his children, which is a privilege denied the majority of parents on the planet, and the concomitant responsibility is for him to ensure that his child attends whenever possible; and certainly not to be excused for a week in Disney World.
Imagine the chaos if every little selfish toe-rag decided to do the same with their kids. But then, this bloke is probably the sort of angry oaf who thinks rules are for others, and never for him.
If he wishes to be the “final arbiter of what’s right for (his) child” with respect to attendance during term time, I suggest he pays for a private education and see what the other parents think when his holiday arrangements disrupt their kid’s classes in this way.
I’m paying taxes towards the education this idiot’s children are getting, and I object, in fact I’m “utterly shocked”, that he thinks he can squander that investment in a cavalier fashion.
Don’t most kids worldwide have free education?
No. Not the norm in most of Africa or Asia. And there’s a lot of kids out there.
Children in some of the poorest 3rd world countries might get some education, but if so it will most likely be from charity funding and not from the state.
*applause* VV
Parents have no ‘right’ to take their children out of school.
I don’t have a problem with the occasional term time holiday at the discretion of the head. If the kid has 100% attendance the rest of the time, or near enough, so what?
The real piss takers will have kids with shit attendance anyway. Poor school attendance is like the #1 indicator of a crappy set of parents. So that sorts that one out: 98%+ and the head might think about it.
The standard joke when you walk through Hull city centre on a weekday is, “When I was a kid you had to go to school”…. so normal is it to see children of all ages out and about – sometimes with parents, most often not.
You could well ask why I’m wandering around town during and am therefore not at work. And you could well get a fat lip.
Not when I was at school in Hull. Mind you the teenagers had to be let out of school to look after their babies. (My school was nicknamed Pramland).
We had one lad in 2nd year (year 5/10 in other people’s money) who only turned up for a morning and an afternoon all year. Not on the same day mind.
You must have been at Hymers 😉
Nah, they played sports on Saturdays. What a waste of good cider and singles time.
(Singles are single cigarettes for those wondering)
Quite. This plonker is boasting that his angelic little Disney-fiend has a 90% attendance record, or thereabouts, as if that justifies a week off eating refined sugar and enriching a multinational conglomerate. Fact is, she’s had a day off every bloody fortnight on average. In my book that’s Olympic standard slacking, not something to be proud of. Time we got a grip on dumb entitled shit like this in this country.
Think there has to rules about in-term holidays but surely a school can keep attendance records, how many times has a holiday been requested before etc and then be sensible about saying yes or no?
As for school holiday pricing a mate used to work in the travel game. T’was a few years back but he claimed if they didn’t hike up prices then the rest of the year’s holidays would need to rise accordingly ie swings and roundabouts…
Schools no longer have any discretion in the matter – the minister has issued a dictat. Doesn’t matter if they have never had a day off in their school careers and it is for their grandparent’s 50th wedding anniversary in another country.
Which seems unreasonable to me.
In Germany, the school holidays are staggered so that children break up at different times across the 16 Bundeslands. That would be a good idea for GB, wouldn’t it?
Also in Canada the French speaking schools have slightly different dates to the English ones. And much longer summer vacation, 9 weeks.(for both)
Well, most European countries have longer school holidays than the UK, which is presumably why educational attainment is so much higher here.
….er….
UK has about the same days off as Canada actually, we don’t do half terms here. There’s only one week off (March break) between Christmas and summer.
As someone who works in the travel industry, I can tell you that Travel is a low
margin business. It is not that prices are so expensive during school holidays but that they are so cheap the rest of the time. Many seem to think that a week’s holiday somewhere hot should cost £200 per person – a price which would buy them a peak return train ticket from Manchester to London. It’s supply and demand people. I have very little sympathy with people who think a holiday at Disneyland is important to their children’s education. If it’s that important then pay up you twat.
@steerpike, I don’t know if you realise but your company email signature was printed as the last sentence of your post.
No, I hadn’t realised, thanks Gatz. Thank you. I can’t see it now, have you removed it?
Sorry – poor quality joke about the ‘pay up you twat’ line.
It made me laugh. Not sure if that contradicts what you said.
Ah. Well played, you got me. The price argument crops up a lot in my job. No one questions why there are no discounts for Christmas trees in December.
Taking your kids out of school to take them to Disneyland teaches your kids a very important lesson – that if you pester your parents enough, eventually they will give you anything you want, even at the expense of getting a criminal record and enduring a fortnight of sticky hell in the company of monstrous cartoon animals. And Americans.
My one experience of Disneyland taught me that no children (or adults) should be allowed to go there ever. At least it was in France and not in bloody Florida. They didn’t even have the wit to sell XL t-shirts that said Grumpy, that was the last straw.
I am 103.
I’ve always been intrigued as to how Disneyland Paris exists, given that in France to acknowledge that anything non-French even exists is punishable by being beaten to death with a sockful of ail. There was that guy over there who described it as a “cultural Chernobyl” before it opened – in the event it’s more accurately a cultural Guantamo, an anomalous US enclave where they can do their dirty work out of sight.
If what one reads about the French is true, JerryLewisWorld would have built first.
I went to the Disneyland Paris and I really enjoyed it. The international tourists go for the rides and the entertainment – and the locals go to see real, live friendly customer service. They find it incroyable.
There is literally no French translation for “Missing you already!!”
Ma coeur! C’est déjà triste parce-que vous etes departez!
Deja tu
*hunches shoulders, juts chin*
*gets cramps and is glad not to actually be French*
A real joy is watching the American management try to cajole their French staff into providing Disney America standard customer service. And failing.
I saw an American manager clearing and wiping tables while her French staff sat smoking at another one. Made me laugh. I wondered who she had annoyed to get sent to Paris.
I suppose it would be like trying to teach a cat to play fetch.
When You Wish Upon a Aw-Ee-Aw
Disneyland Paris is absolutely fine. I had a cracking time with my kids back when they were the age to enjoy it.
I realise I’m supposed to hate it and everything it stands for but actually it’s brilliant. So there.
But it’s Paris! why take your kids round a huge amusement park when you could take them to the Musee D’Orsay and plonk them in front of Courbet’s La Source ?
(Don’t Google that)
I did, cos you said don’t and I’m a rebel. She certainly makes the rocking world go round.
Taking your kids to that would be genuinely educational. Even if they are in their 30s. They wouldn’t have a clue what it was.
It’s not Paris. It’s in the middle of the countryside. And who says you can’t do both? (We did.)
From the countryside to the… oh dear, I don’t like that word.
I don’t have any sort of axe to grind as regards term time absence but surely the costs of holidays is purely supply and demand. I fully appreciate that people need to have children to keep the world going but for most people it’s a purely voluntary thing and economics of holidays doesn’t seem to have changed for at least the last 40 years so why do parents always seem surprised? Part of the pricing structure of holidays is to encourage some people to have their holidays “out of season”. If prices were flat through the year, I would guess that rooms would lay empty necessitating general price rises and subsequent discounting of the unsold holidays and we’d be back to here we are today with prices dictated by supply and demand where nobody actually pays the rack rates for hotel rooms and people like to think they’ve got a discount.
Every time this type of case pops up, people moan about the holiday companies charging more in peak season. This is just market forces. It could equally be argued that the low prices are heavily discounted.
And it’s always a parent who is taken their kid to Disney that’s kicking off*. I doubt two weeks in Orlando is going to broaden horizons much.
* I know it isn’t but it seems that way.
Well I dragged mine of to Cape Canaveral, and I do mean dragged. But they enjoyed the first 4 hours. Second 4 hours not so much…
My favourite contribution to this discussion was someone on Facebook’s “If you can’t afford the holidays you shouldn’t have kids!”
I know when we were thinking of starting a family that was certainly item one on the agenda.
My other half who works in child protection reckons that the cheap holidays in the Sun newspaper cause a nightmare as they are only generally only available in term time.