School Penalty Fines and Authorised Absence

Debate between Lilian Greenwood and Peter Heaton-Jones

Monday 11th July 2016 Westminster Hall

[Peter Heaton-Jones (North Devon) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hanson. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Steve Double) on securing this important debate. We are both south-west MPs, and this issue has particular resonance and significance in a region where tourism is an incredibly important part of the economy. I thank the Minister for being here and for meeting me to discuss a particular case. The meeting was useful, and I will mention more details of the case in a moment. I know he is listening, and I know he is open to some of our suggestions.

I am sure I speak for my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay when I say that we seek to be helpful. We are not seeking to cause problems, to rebel for the sake of it or to make a nuisance. All south-west MPs and Members from all areas of the country are being contacted by many thousands of worried parents and headteachers about their real concerns with the current position, and it is incumbent on us to inform the Minister and the Government of those concerns. I do not seek to create difficulty; I merely seek to raise an issue that many of my constituents, and I am sure many constituents of right hon. and hon. Members on both sides of the House, have raised.

[Lilian Greenwood]

I have a great deal of sympathy with some of the hon. Gentleman’s points, but will he concede that headteachers are also expressing concern that the current uncertainty, as well as the change requested by the petition, could make it more difficult for them to encourage good attendance, which they believe is important for the good achievement and progress of their pupils?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

I will discuss the specifics of the petition in a moment, but as I said in my opening remarks, it is not just parents but headteachers who are contacting us to express concerns about the status quo.

It is important to point out that nobody here, including my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay, is arguing that education should not be compulsory. Of course it should. Nobody is arguing, either, that parents should have an automatic right to decide that they want to take their children out of school for a set number of days a year.

That goes exactly to the point made by the hon. Member for Nottingham South (Lilian Greenwood). Like my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay, I do not agree with the headline of the petition, which mentions bringing back the 10 days of authorised absence. We could argue for some time about whether it ever existed in the first place, but I do not support that idea. I do not believe that parents should expect an automatic right to a certain number of absence days a year, or that a headteacher should expect to approve them. I want common sense. I want the responsibility to go back to individual headteachers and individual parents, so that they decide what is right for individual children in individual cases. I keep using the word “individual” deliberately, because we cannot have a one-size-fits-all policy that seeks to impose a centrally decided rule on all children in all circumstances. We need the common sense of individual discretion back in the system.

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

My hon. Friend makes an important point. I do not know whether she saw my remarks in advance, but I was coming on to say that what I want is a world where we recognise that the best people to make decisions for children in individual cases are their parents and their headteacher. Those are the people who should be making such decisions, and they need the discretion to do so.

Now, however, everyone is confused by the vacuum created following the Isle of Wight court case. As my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay suggested, we need some certainty from the Minister—I am sure that he will be able to provide it—about the Government’s position on the court case, which has left people concerned. In particular, the fear among headteachers to whom I have spoken is that under the existing regulations, if they authorise absences from their school, they will be penalised when Ofsted comes and looks at their absence statistics. Headteachers are rightly worried about the implications of that for the rest of their school.

We need a clear indication from the Minister that when headteachers decide that they wish to authorise an absence in individual circumstances, Ofsted will not count it against the absence figures for their school as a whole. Headteachers need the certainty that if they feel it is right to make a particular decision in the case of a particular child, they can do so without being penalised from above.

My hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay mentioned the situation in Devon. Due to the uncertainty brought on by the Isle of Wight case, Devon County Council has now suspended all actions against parents, some of whom have been summonsed to court or made a first appearance before magistrates. That is absolutely the right thing to do in the circumstances, but I am afraid it merely adds to the sense of confusion.

One case that hon. Members may have seen reported widely in the national media at about the same time as the Isle of Wight case was that of my constituents Edward and Hazel Short. Mr and Mrs Short have two daughters, Nicole and Lauren, aged 16 and 15 respectively. Nicole and Lauren have represented England at volleyball. They are budding national athletes. This piece of paper in front of me—which is from the Daily Mirror, just to prove that there is absolutely no political bias in my choice of media—describes Nicole and Lauren as

“being hailed as stars of the future.”

This is their story: Nicole and Lauren were invited on a three-week training session. Two of the weeks coincided with school term time, and six and a half days’ absence from school would have been required. Their headteacher decided that he was not in a position to authorise their absence, and a fixed penalty notice of £60 was issued. Mr and Mrs Short decided not to pay it, and the next thing they knew, Devon County Council summonsed them to appear in court. They appeared before north Devon magistrates. They still did not accept the fine, and said that they would fight their case all the way.

Devon County Council then summonsed Mr and Mrs Short further to appear in court this month. When the finding in the Isle of Wight case went against the Government, as my hon. Friend said, Devon County Council decided that Mr and Mrs Short’s case, and a number of others with which it was currently dealing in the same way, would be suspended and no further action would be taken.

[Lilian Greenwood]

My understanding is that headteachers have the authority to allow a request for leave during term time in exceptional circumstances. Is the hon. Gentleman aware of why the headteacher, knowing that those young people had the potential to represent their country, did not consider the circumstances exceptional?

[Peter Heaton-Jones]

It is a perfectly reasonable question. I tried to answer it in advance by saying that there is always a concern about what Ofsted’s view will be when it considers absences on the school roll across the board. All headteachers are extremely concerned that if they authorise such an absence, it will count against them when their overall absence statistics are considered.

Let me be clear: I have no criticism whatever of the school or the headteacher for the decision that they made. They felt that they had no choice but to do so; that is the point. The issue of choice is fundamental. Parents and headteachers should, in exceptional circumstances, have the freedom and choice to allow absence. That is what they are currently being denied, and in my view that cannot be right.

I raise that case in particular not only because it is in my constituency but because it specifically did not involve giving the children a holiday; that was not the purpose of the absence request. Yet it is absolutely the case that in Devon, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay and many other constituencies, the tourism sector plays a vital role in the local economy, and it is being badly affected by the current situation. By some measures, one in six jobs in my constituency depend either directly or indirectly on the tourism sector. It is a vital driver of the local economy, and many families in my constituency work in it.

Not only does the current situation create the problem that many families are unable to take advantage of cheaper holidays during term time, but for the many hundreds—indeed, probably thousands—of families who work in the tourism sector in my constituency, there is no way that they can go away during the school holidays. That is the time when they run their family businesses, so they are impeded in their ability to take their children away. I am afraid that by not helping them do so, we are not helping the holiday business.

I have read the transcript of a previous discussion in the main Chamber between my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay and the Minister. The point was made that we need the Government to think carefully about changing the regulations, due to their effect on the tourism industry. I hope the Minister will not mind my quoting him. He said:

“I do not believe that we should be returning to the Dickensian world where the needs of industry and commerce take precedence over the education of children.”

No one is suggesting that. No one is suggesting that children should be allowed to be taken away from school to satisfy the wishes of a few small businesses. This is a bigger issue than that. In the same discussion, he also said:

“I doubt that the Cornish tourism industry will be best pleased by his”—

my hon. Friend’s—

“assertion that tourism in Cornwall is dependent on truanting children for its survival.”—[Official Report, 19 May 2016; Vol. 611, c. 139-40.]

The Cornish tourism industry is not, and I am delighted to say that the Devon tourism industry is not. In particular, the north Devon tourism industry is not; that is the best place to spend a holiday.

The point is that we are talking not about truanting children but about the right of parents and teachers to agree, in a few cases, that it is appropriate in the circumstances for children to be taken out of school for a family holiday if they might otherwise miss out on one. That is the point. Families and children are missing out on a family holiday through no fault of their own and face the risk of being dragged before the courts or fined substantial amounts of money. Headteachers feel that they are having taken away from them the right to make individual decisions in individual circumstances.

Perhaps another result of this debate will be that holiday companies, airlines and those that offer package holidays take a long hard look at themselves. They should not be charging such vastly inflated prices during school holidays. I shall cite one example, which I raised the last time we debated this subject. I think you were in the Chair for at least some of that sitting, Mr Hanson; forgive me for outlining this particular circumstance again, but it tells the story rather well. A package holiday to Spain for a family of two adults and two children beginning on 14 July would have cost £1,300. The same holiday, with identical flights and accommodation, beginning just two weeks later when the school holidays had begun, would have cost £2,000. That is a 60% mark-up. It would not be allowed in any other retail business, and we should not put up with it. It is not just the Government who I ask, respectfully, to think again about where we are; the holiday industry needs to take a long, hard look at itself as well.