Holidays During School Term Time

Rupert Lowe Excerpts

Monday 27th October 2025 Westminster Hall

[Rupert Lowe (Great Yarmouth) (Ind)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Lewell.

Parents bring their children into this world; they clothe them, feed them, love them, raise them and, yes, educate them. Schools should support families, not to replace them. Yet right now in Britain parents are being fined and threatened simply for taking their children out of school for a handful of days to spend meaningful time together as a family. Is that such an awful crime? I think not.

This is a society that treats the state, not the parent, as the ultimate authority. The Government claim that missing five days of school a year will somehow destroy a child’s education. Really? If so, we have no confidence in our education system at all. Meanwhile, schools hold teacher training days in term time, or teachers strike and shut classrooms; yet somehow it is parents who are punished when learning is interrupted.

I say they should take the teacher training days in the school holidays—there are certainly plenty of those to choose from. The state must realise that parents are not the enemy. A short term-time family holiday is not an act of neglect; often, it is the only opportunity many families ever get for such an experience, because the travel industry hikes prices to astronomical levels outside term time.

[James McMurdock (South Basildon and East Thurrock) (Ind)]

Would the hon. Member agree that, while price controls are a nice idea in theory, they are a terrible idea in practice? Supply and demand ultimately dictate the price of something so, while it is a nice suggestion, it would not work in real life. Does he agree?

[Rupert Lowe]

I agree with the hon. Member.

Why should working families be priced out of memories—particularly parents such as those in my Great Yarmouth constituency, who rely so heavily on the tourism trade during the school holidays for their careers or business activity? Parents know what is best for their children far better than a distant bureaucrat sitting in Westminster armed with a spreadsheet. Those are the same bureaucrats who thought it best to lock children away from school for months on end for what equated to a bad cold for the vast majority of them during lockdown. I think I will listen to the parents.

I suggest three basic reforms. Every family should have the right to a small number of authorised term-time absence days each year, at the family’s discretion; there should be no fines for responsible parents; headteachers must be empowered to use their own judgment. Let us end the nonsense that Government officials somehow know our children better than we do.

Childhood is short. Parents should not need permission from the state to raise their own children. It is time to return authority to parents and to shrink the reach of this bloated and inefficient state into our family lives. Let us put families back at the top of the agenda, where they used to be.