Derbyshire is also a fantastic place to go on holiday. Let us champion every constituency. I think that we are on safe ground, with cross-party support, when championing the UK tourism industry.
We need to be 100% sure that there are not some unscrupulous operators, but predominantly we need to focus on the two other areas of discretion and flexibility. On discretion, there is already confusion among a lot of parents. A lot of parents have contacted me to say, “We have triggered fines. We feel that our decision to take our children out of school was justified, but the school came back and said, ‘Under the new rules, there is absolutely no discretion; you will be fined’.” As a Government representative, I have almost felt obliged to apologise on behalf of the Government.
At one school that has made the new rules clear, the chair of governors said, “No. Actually, there is discretion. We, through the pastoral team, will look at those parents whose children have excellent attendance records and
are achieving well in school and we will look at why they might be taken out of school, for a funeral, say, compared to a holiday without educational benefits, and it would be weighed up.” Clearly, there is confusion and that needs to be resolved.
There is the assumption that there is pressure from Ofsted because it looks at attendance records when rating a school. If a school decides to say that, because of cost and work pressures, it will allow a good level of discretion, its attendance records do not look good. That also needs to be considered, because that would be a disincentive for a school to apply common sense discretion.
I think that all hon. Members would agree that, perhaps, discretion should apply where children are doing well and where parents work during school holidays. My hon. Friend the Member for Portsmouth North (Penny Mordaunt), who is a champion for the armed forces, highlights one career, but I am sure that there many others, in all our constituencies, where parents can take their children on holiday only during school time. We have all noticed the cost of peak holidays.
There are some challenges. I have been contacted by teachers who say that they do not like being in the firing line and having discretion, because if they feel that the child should not be given time off they are the ones who are blamed. Sometimes there are reasons why that should not be so. I have also been told that, in the past, when there was discretion about 10 days or 10 sessions, some parents felt that it was an automatic right to have that every year, even if the child was struggling. There was never a case of a parent saying, “You’re absolutely right. I’ll now withdraw that request.” It would create heated discussion. If we are to consider discretions, clear guidelines, which were suggested earlier, are an absolute must.
We must also consider teachers, because although discretion can help pupils and parents, the teachers would not have discretion to take time off during terms. That is not necessarily a complete, one-size-fits-all solution.
I am a big fan of flexibility in this regard. One big suggestion is flexible term times. About a year ago I was contacted by a resident, Nicki Mitchell, on this issue. I suggested flexible term times and was asked, “What happens if you have a child in a primary school and another at a secondary school, and they have different term times? That will make it even harder.” A number of residents have contacted me and said that such flexibility exists in Europe and that it is done by county or region. We might decide that the south-east goes a couple of weeks earlier and the south-west goes a couple of weeks later. However, in Europe it is done in rotation, so it is not always the south-west or south-east first. Not only would that help parents and children, but it would probably help the tourism industry, because almost regardless of what it charges it can fill up at peak time, but the rest of year it faces a real challenge. Spreading that across the year would be helpful.
If we cannot manage flexible term times, another suggestion is extending the school year by two weeks and allowing everybody automatically two weeks’ worth of discretion throughout the year. That would probably be incredibly unpopular with teachers, who would then face an extra two weeks, but I thought that I would mention it.