Holidays in School Term Time 

Neil O'Brien Excerpts

Monday 25th November 2024 Westminster Hall

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Edward. I declare an interest: as a parent of two primary school children, I am acutely aware of the cost of doing anything fun with small children. Like other Members who have spoken, I wince when I look at the cost of going on holiday anywhere and see that it is radically cheaper just a few weeks before the school holidays, so I completely understand the motivation behind this petition and why so many people have signed it. I echo what the hon. Member for Lichfield (Dave Robertson) said about the importance of those memories. I will have the memories of being on the north coast of Scotland this summer with my small children forever.

I will come to what we can do to make it easier for parents, but I will first touch on the very good speeches and interventions from the hon. Members for Lichfield, for Stoke-on-Trent South (Dr Gardner), for Mid Dorset and North Poole (Vikki Slade), for Poole (Neil Duncan-Jordan) and for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom). I agree that we have a major school attendance issue, so we need to address the petition in that context.

People often think, “Well, if we’re out a bit, it’s not so bad. Being absent a lot is a problem, but is being absent a bit really a problem?” The statistical truth is that it is a big problem, unfortunately. If there is a 10% decrease in pupils’ attendance at school, the number who get a GCSE grade 5 or above in English and maths halves: 55% of those in the 0% to 5% range of absence get grade 5 or above, but only 22% in the 10% to 15% range do so. What seems like not a huge decrease in attendance has a huge impact. As Members who are former teachers expressed well, those pupils lose the thread, start to fall behind and find it difficult to follow the sequence of what others have already learned, so the problems compound. That is why it is a problem for them not to be in school when they need to be.

When the Conservatives were in office, we took steps to address this major challenge, which has become particularly acute since the pandemic. Schools have always had a duty to keep a register of children not in school, but we worked with local authorities to make it more accurate and we committed to making it statutory. In January, we committed to double the number of attendance hubs to support about 1 million extra children with attendance.

We did things at different levels. We invested £15 million in one-to-one monitoring for 10,000 children with particularly severe attendance issues. For a wider group of pupils with quite serious attendance problems, we put an extra £200 million into the Supporting Families programme—an early intervention programme—taking the spending to £700 million a year. As the issue overlaps to some extent with special educational needs, we increased spending on the high-needs block by 70%—£4 billion extra a year. People may say, “It’s not enough because the need is ever expanding,” and I completely understand that. We need to do more, but it is worth noting that that money has gone in. We also need to tackle the root causes of the growth of demand. I am sure the Government agree with that and want to do more about it.

We were making progress on the attendance challenge. In school year 2022-23, we had 440,000 fewer persistently absent pupils than the year before, but there was still a long way to go because the patterns of attendance had not got back to pre-pandemic levels. In truth, even before the pandemic, although the proportion of pupils with good attendance was about 70% in primary school, in secondary school it dipped down in years 9 and 10 to just above 60%, and the problem was radically compounded after the pandemic.

There are a lot of different bits to this—people working from home with their kids there, or taking days here and there; people having the challenge of wanting to go on holiday; and much more serious social problems, with children who are routinely and significantly not in school a lot of the time—but we cannot lose sight of, and would do a disservice to parents if we did not share with them, the evidence that what might seem like small amounts of non-attendance have pretty bad effects on pupils’ attendance.

I am absolutely not saying, however, that nothing can be done; Members have alluded to some of the ideas. The hon. Member for Lichfield did a good job of talking to all the different people who care about the issue. He mentioned the Parentkind idea about when the school terms are, and I have some experience of that in Leicestershire: we are out of step with everybody—for historical reasons to do with how the factories used to shut in Nottingham, Derby and Leicester, we finish our school year a week earlier than everyone else and go back a week earlier than everyone else.

The last Government looked at whether, as Members have suggested, we could do more to stagger school holidays around the country. Obviously, Scotland often has different holidays, but the challenge—I have direct experience of this—is where we have a border. There was a brief moment when schools in the city of Leicester and Leicestershire had their holidays at different times, which was a massive pain for parents, because of course if they had one kid in school, but one needed looking after at home, they could not go on holiday.

I think there is potential in staggering holidays, and I understand why local authorities might want to explore that to give parents the benefits of finding cheaper holidays, but I would add that caution is needed. If we create borders with parents’ kids on either side of them, we can create problems for the parents, rather than making any of the problems better.

I am entirely sympathetic: the Government could do a huge array of things to make it easier to go on holiday, such as improve the cost of living for parents, and think about the taxes on holidays and on flying in this country. I am supportive of schools, and of course they have to be compassionate and sensible, in particular about bereavement as the hon. Member for Mid Dorset and North Poole pointed out, as well as using their discretion.

My own schools on the edge of Leicester do a good job of using their discretion to be sensible about the fact that they are often juggling the festivals of at least four different major world religions at the same time, which is not easy. We also have to be careful and honest with parents about the risks of deciding not to attend school and to miss a couple of weeks, which might not seem like a lot, but which we and the educators in the Chamber know can have a particularly bad effect on kids’ education. We must balance our desire to make things cheaper for parents with our desire for children to get a good education. We must continue the work—which I am sure the Government will do—of ensuring that we get school absence under control, because it is such an important driver of overall achievement.