Taking your child out of school doesn’t necessarily make you a terrible parent

More than 16,000 parents were prosecuted for taking their children out of school in term time last year. But there are lots of reasons why a child might need a break or a change – this punitive attitude is not a good lesson

Sometimes it could be that parents know their child really needs some quality time with their family, even if the school is not in a position to be able to understand that.

This year’s A-level results have been distributed – accompanied, as usual, by excitement, controversy and acrimony. Those who got the results they hoped for? They are on their way to a marvellous and fulfilling life, crammed with achievement, respect and money.

Those who didn’t? Some may be staring into the deep, dark, scary abyss that is life without a degree. They will take consolation from the people fond of declaring that they have done fantastically well without a university education. But everybody knows such people are the exception that proves the rule.

Education – as much of it as possible – has never been more important. Quite a lot of people don’t appear to know this. They’re so astoundingly ignorant of the great necessity of educational aspiration that they don’t even ensure that their children are attending school with the regularity and precision of an Olympic adjudicator’s stopwatch.

And we’re not talking about a day here and there. Last year, 16,430 parents in England were so wilfully blase about their child’s school attendance that they were prosecuted for it. Of those, 12,479 were found guilty, 9,214 were issued with fines (of ￡172, on average), and 18 were sent to prison. Pour encourager les autres, as we graduates say.

The threat of prison, apparently, is a really good way for schools to motivate recalcitrant parents. It helps them to understand how serious the situation is. Indeed, I do have a friend who used to tell her school-hating daughter that Mum could go to prison if her child didn’t attend. The funny thing, though, is that this isn’t true – or shouldn’t be, at least.

Parents in England are under no legal obligation to send their children to school, although they are legally obliged to provide them with an education of some kind. Pretty much every one of these prosecuted parents could have avoided the wrath of the authorities simply by writing to the school and saying that they were withdrawing their child, to be educated otherwise. The paradox here, I suppose, is that if you’re not proficient enough as a parent to get your kids to school when they’re supposed to be there, then you’re hardly likely to be proficient enough to organise their education yourself.

But what if your child’s refusal to go to school is not, in fact, prima facie evidence that you aren’t a proficient parent? What if, instead, you are a perfectly decent parent who understands that school is distressing your child in quite a profound way? Even if you have large sums of cash at your disposal – and most people don’t – it is pretty much impossible to find an alternative mainstream educational environment for a child who doesn’t thrive at a conventional school, even if this is for a good reason.

The assumption is that schools will pick up learning disabilities, behavioural disorders and so on, and offer support. The reality is that even if, as a concerned parent, you get your child assessed by an educational psychologist, no one at the school – including staff in the special needs department – is likely to have much insight into what the results might mean for your child and their learning profile.

Many parents of children with Asperger’s syndrome home-school because conventional schooling is simply too crowded, too noisy, too smelly, too bright, too ever-changing, too rule-bound, too prescriptive and too full of complex social demands for children with even the mildest of autistic-spectrum disorders to cope with. School is just too school-like for them. The parents are right and the schools are wrong. And that’s just one example.

So, my question is this: what if the huge number of parents being prosecuted for their child’s non-attendance at school isn’t actually indicative of an epidemic of bad parenting at all? What if, instead, it’s indicative of an education system that is inflexible in its demand for conformity from children and families who are incapable of providing it, even with the best will in the world?

There’s a tendency to believe that only two sorts of families end up in trouble because they can’t get their child to go to school. One is the sort that lives on benefits in squalor, the adults unable to get up in the morning themselves, let alone get up and get their children off to school. Again and again, fining parents for their child’s truancy is being linked to benefits, and some in government are proposing that fines should be docked from benefits automatically.

The other sort are the ones so certain of the importance of a fortnight in Florida that they are willing to take their children out of school during term-time to afford it. For two years, schools have had the power to fine parents who do so without permission, and if these aren’t paid, court action may follow. Some experts put the huge rise in prosecutions during the last couple of years down to this.

What is notable about both of those scenarios is that each places the fault with the family for having the wrong attitude to education. There is no acknowledgment, none at all, that it is possible for an educational relationship to break down because the parent knows their child better than the school does.

Obviously, I’m not in favour of parents being lazy and neglectful of their children. But, holidays? A family that took their child away on a holiday even though they knew the school would not agree to it is not necessarily a family that doesn’t value education. It could be a family that knows that their child really, really needs some quality time with her family, even if the school is not in a position to be able to begin to understand that.

The Department of Education insists: “Our evidence shows missing the equivalent of just one week a year from school can mean a child is a quarter less likely to achieve good GCSE grades.”

The trouble is, an education system that knows the grade of everything and the value of nothing is an education system that has forgotten what education is for.

How can education foster creative and inquiring minds when disagreeing with what educators think is best has become a crime? It’s great to do well at school, get good grades, go to university and join a useful profession. But it’s dreadful to insist that families and children who don’t fit that mould, and think other things are important too, are inferior, wrong and in need of punishment.