Will staggered school holidays make any difference?

Gary Jacobs, chief executive of Fox Kalomaski Crossing, the creative marketing specialists, wonders if flexible term times is really the solution..

"In his speech to Durand Academy on 1 September 2011, the Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove, talked about the ‘missing million’ children who are absent from school for more than three weeks a year. He referred to the ‘educational underclass’ of children who are outside the mainstream education world and how many of them have simply not spent enough time in school to achieve academic success.*

Whilst school attendance records are reported to be slowly improving, the new legislation is aimed at preventing parents from taking their children out of school during term time for a family holiday.

Many parents have faced this dilemma, with reasons varying widely from wanting to miss the last day of school to avoid the traffic/crowds/fare increases to wanting to take a month-long road-trip across America.

Ironically, it was often easier to get permission for a month rather than just one day. The month-long trip of a lifetime may have been approved by a sympathetic head teacher on the basis of its educational benefits and the fact that this kind of request is relatively few and far between.

But realistically, we are looking primarily at parents who want to take their children away in term time for a seven or 14-night holiday in order take advantage of lower prices, or at working parents who are restricted to taking holidays during term time.

For those parents in jobs that don’t allow for flexibility in planning family holidays, it is a challenging and frustrating situation. Therefore, it is incumbent on the appropriate bodies to lobby employers and relevant trade bodies with the objective of changing attitudes to working mothers and fathers and their holiday entitlement.

Inevitably it is down to the issue of affordability. Even when you take the great value package holidays on offer from the mass-market operators, there are still many more families who can’t afford these prices.

The inconvenient truth is that businesses need to make a profit to survive and peak travel periods may be the only time that some companies will make any profit at all. A situation all too familiar to the retail sector, which makes most of its annual profits over the Christmas period.

Flattening out the peak period by changing school holiday times is the strategy that ABTA is currently lobbying for, but many parents and teachers believe that this may bring a different kind of chaos. In reality, if school holidays were to be stretched over a longer period, it is likely that most commercially-focussed company bosses would aim to maximise the profit opportunities, recognising that demand would still be high over this prolonged period.

The debate is set to continue, but in the meantime the Government and the travel industry will be the main beneficiaries of the change in legislation – the Government will enjoy a reduction in lost school days and the travel industry will potentially benefit from an increase in families buying during the extended peak time.

Meanwhile, teachers will bear the brunt of parents’ frustration and parents will face the financial strain of paying the price, either through buying the holiday itself at peak rates or facing the fine if they take their children out of school at the wrong time.”

* Extract from ‘Improving attendance at school by Charlie Taylor (The Government’s Expert Adviser on Behaviour)’