My friends take their children on term time holidays – I’m not envious, I’m furious

When my daughter Annie came home from school aged seven bemoaning her best friend Ellie was “on holiday”, I assured her she must be mistaken. With another fortnight of school left before they broke up for summer, I told Annie I was sure she’d got it wrong and Ellie would be back tomorrow. Catching up with Ellie’s mum Nicole on the last day of term though, she reliably informed me Annie was right and they’d had the best time on holiday in Greece. She caught my eyebrow raise and proudly declared she didn’t mind the fine because they’d saved hundreds of pounds going in term time. Now, there’s not much that annoys me – I have three children who’ve tried their whole lives and come close many times – but taking children out of school to go on a holiday always infuriates me. Why? It’s simply not right and it’s unfair to both the children being taken out of their usual routine and the teachers who prepare the learning. Unauthorised holidays are a growing problem. According to the Department for Education, the overall absence rate for the academic year 2025-26 for pupils in England was running at 6.93 per cent, still significantly above pre-Covid levels of 4.7 per cent. Persistent absence rates have doubled since the pandemic, with nearly one in five children now missing at least 10 per cent of school. Shorts There are various factors driving school absence, but you only have to walk through a packed British beach on a Friday in June, or see families at the airport in September to know that term time trips have become far too normalised. Fines, which caused a furore when they first came in to existence in 2013, are clearly not working and in my view need to be more serious. Everyone knows how term times work. They don’t change, they’re always set and always have been. Even if you’re childless, you’ll remember being at school and the really big gap of six weeks in the academic year. Six weeks is plenty of time to take children away and if it’s more expensive at that time, arguably parents chose to have children, no one makes us do it and we know the financial implications of the decision when we make it. I have three children, Eddie, now 22, Sammy, 17, and Annie, 15. I’ve searched and sorted holidays for us all for over two decades and, despite the potential saving of thousands, I’ve never taken them out of school for a jolly and I never would. Don’t mistake my anger for envy. I take my children away during the school holidays like a lot of parents do. For me, it’s about fairness. Schools aren’t voluntary, there isn’t an open door procedure where people can come and go as they like and it’s not opt-in attendance. There’s structure, learning, goals, assessments and a lot of planning that goes in to making the system, the classes, the teachers and the learning work. Taking your child away in the middle of that disrupts their learning and routine. It’s also incredibly disrespectful to the teachers who are trying to plan activities or end of term ideas for the children to enjoy. Of course, it impacts the rule-abiding children too, who have to waste time going over vital topics and lessons their classmates missed. And, like my daughter experienced, they also miss their friends and don’t have them to play with while they’re gone. Parents make vague claims about taking homework on their holidays and learning valuable lessons about other cultures, but I’m never conviced. It’s always down to the already busy teacher to help children catch up on the learning they’ve missed. The argument my friends who do it give me is that they enjoy much needed family time. Or that their trips to historical sites in Europe are educational. While I don’t disagree with both those points, they are absolutely able to execute them both between the end of July and the start of the new academic year in September. The problem is that too many people now seem to see the rules as optional if they have enough money to ignore them. The fine has become part of the holiday budget rather than a punishment. Parents openly swap tips on social media about how much they’ll save by travelling in June instead of August, almost boasting that even after paying the penalty they’re still quids in. That completely undermines the point of having attendance rules in the first place. It’s a bad example to set to kids. We spend years telling our children that rules matter, that commitments should be honoured and that education is important. Then some adults effectively tell them those principles only apply when they’re convenient. We can’t expect children to take school seriously if the adults in their lives are willing to treat attendance as negotiable because the flights happened to be cheaper. I’m not suggesting for a second that children get punished when they get back to school. It wasn’t their decision to go. But I do think the financial sting needs to be sufficient that it’s a real deterrent: £80 is barely a slap on the wrist and that amount is absolutely not a deterrent when parents are saving hundreds or thousands on the bottom line of a holiday. If you choose to have children, you agree to a silent code – that code includes everything from limitless patience to teaching them to tie their shoes and saying “please” and “thank you”. If attendance genuinely matters – and every government insists that it does – then the consequences for deliberately ignoring the rules should reflect that.