Teaching your children at home is your privilege, NOX, and well done with that. However, the vast majority of parents are either unable or unwilling to do so.
So we come to “organised “ education. Secondary, and particularly primary school children cannot be expected to organise their tuition as if they were undertaking a degree course. Their syllabus needs structure, discipline and proper organisation. So, joko, you take your child out of school for a fortnight and the teachers have to spend time making good what they’ve missed. A few days after your holiday starts, another couple of children do the same. The following week another couple do so. Very soon you have an almost constant stream of children being “brought up to speed” and this impacts on all the class. It also gives other children the notion that disappearing for a couple of weeks is perfectly acceptable. I have to disagree profoundly with your contention that missing about 18% of lessons in a single term will have no effect. Many younger children have precious little motivation and receive minimal encouragement to learn as it is. To suggest they will work hard at home to catch up is fanciful in the extreme. It was be interesting to hear the views of some AB-ers who have connections with education.
Of course the cost of all this in invisible because it is lost in the general “noise” surrounding the education budget. But parents who pay for their children’s education can see this clearly. For parents paying around £6k per term (an average price for non-boarders) a fortnight’s education sets them back about a grand. You will find very few fee-paying schools which will authorise holidays in term time and even fewer parents wanting to take their children away. They are fully aware of the financial cost but are also aware of the adverse effect this has on their children and the others in their class. This has nothing to do with them being more able to afford holidays in school holiday time. Many parents paying to educate their children make huge sacrifices to afford the fees and among the sacrifices many of them make, ironically, are holidays.
I’m quite pleased the Education Secretary is planning to arrest the growth of this scandal. Whether he succeeds is debatable but the penalties will have to be far harsher than at present.