Time for common sense over school holidays

It might be the realization that the summer holidays are just over the horizon – but last week proved something of a watershed on both sides of the Irish Sea on the age-old question of when you can and cannot allow your children to miss school.

On one hand, here, new Minister Denis Naughten briefly suggested linking child benefit to school attendance – in other words, you get the dosh if your kids do the homework.

Not the most unreasonable suggestion ever, you’d have thought – although he was slapped down by the liberals who couldn’t contemplate even lay-abouts losing out on the children’s allowance.

At the same time, a father in the UK went all the way to the British High Court after he was hit with a £120 fine for taking his seven year old daughter to Disneyland when all the other kids were in school.

Jon Platt won his case against Isle of Wight Council because his daughter had an otherwise exemplary attendance record.

And to be honest, even if she was a bit scatty on time-keeping you’d have thought that, at seven, she had enough time left to make up the missing week before university.

Plus – if she’s like every other child – she’d just banked a lifetime’s worth of very special memories.

As with everything the correct stance on this lies somewhere in the middle – it is s criminal offence to keep your children from school unless you are approved for home schooling…but it’s not an indictable offence to treat them to a once-off holiday of a lifetime.

And while Denis Naughten is consistent in his efforts to link child benefit to school attendance, he is certainly not advocating some Big Brother approach.

He just wants some way of making parents accountable for their children – and as everybody knows, nothing focuses the mind more than money.

Knowing him, I doubt he saw this as a way of depriving families of a few bob or saving the state a fortune.

This wasn’t about docking people because the child is two days out of school – it was about tackling long-term absenteeism which is defined as missing more than 20 days of school.

And that’s a bigger problem that you might have thought - the Department of Social Protection issues about 300,000 letters annually to parents requesting confirmation that their children are resident in the State and are attending school.

Some might argue that middle class families heading off to Disneyland during term should be hit with a stiff penalty – but have you ever priced the difference between this trip in October and in July?

It’s like two different resorts.

Many families cannot afford to pay summer prices for holidays – but why should the state deprive them of creating memories with their children?

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.