The assumption is an obvious one: if you fine people for bad behaviour, they should stop. But human psychology is much more complicated than that. The reality is that financial penalties often fail because they inadvertently shift human behaviour from a moral framework to a market framework.
In other words, the punishable behaviour stops being about right or wrong and instead becomes an economic choice. For example, rather than thinking, ‘littering is bad for my community,’ people instead ask themselves, ‘Is it worth £100 to leave my rubbish rather than take it with me?’ A social wrongdoing now becomes a purchasable commodity: people can ‘buy’ the right to break a rule, because the distinction is no longer between illegal and legal, but what is legal for a price.
This phenomenon – sometimes known as the crowding-out effect – explains why fining parents for taking their children on holidays during term-time simply does not work. Despite increasing fines for unauthorised absences to £80 per parent (increasing to £160 if not paid in 21 days), more parents are taking their children out of school than ever. The number of penalty notices for school absences reached a record high of almost 500,000 in the 2024-2025 school year, with the Parentkind National Parent Survey revealing that more than one in five parents (around two million across the whole of the UK) removed their child from school to take them on a more affordable holiday.
It’s madness that every family in England is forced to compete for the same week’s holiday in May half term
The cost-benefit incentive is clear. Fines put a price on this parental choice, but this price is far less than the cost-saving on holidays. This gives parents a get-out from their responsibility to keep their children in school, ironically making absenteeism more likely.
So what choices do we have? A petition to scrap the fines altogether has attracted more than 138,000 signatures, with campaigners suggesting fines have ‘become a stealth tax’ (or a cash cow for councils) and are a ‘blunt, ineffective tool’ when it comes to improving attendance. Campaigners argue that ‘the attendance legislation is being abused’; it was originally ‘introduced to tackle persistent absenteeism when parents refused to engage with support’, but now this focus on ‘punishment’ rather than ‘collaboration’ is driving a ‘wedge between school and home’.
This is all true, and they are right to argue that repeated casual absences are far more destructive to a child’s learning than calculated absences for family time. Yet how do you balance individual liberty with social responsibility? Yes, parents have a right to take their child out of school; yes, holidays can be hugely socially and culturally enriching; yes, we should not underestimate the value of out-of-school experiences and the huge financial pressures families are under.
Parents deserve to feel they have some agency, but they also have a duty to keep their children in school as much as possible. They must acknowledge that all absences create a degree of disruption and missed learning, as well as a more pernicious message that ‘the rules don’t apply.’
Instead, there are two other alternatives to consider. The first is that schools be given more discretion to make pragmatic, common-sense decisions around leave. Headteachers used to be allowed to grant up to 10 days of absence per pupil; permission was conditional (for example, subject to pupils taking work with them) and requests could be rejected if they clashed with particularly busy parts of the school year.
In 2013, however, the Department for Education removed this autonomy, and post-Covid targets have simply created a culture of fear. Schools are now terrified of being penalised by Ofsted for having attendance rates below 95 per cent, and parents are less likely to be transparent with schools for risk of being put down as an unauthorised absence.
An easy solution, therefore, would be to give head teachers more prudence, as they have in the independent sector. This way they can differentiate between students with otherwise very good attendance whose parents are making an exceptional, justified request and those whose parents are too willing to pull them out for any excuse.
The second option would be to stagger school holidays in order to alleviate pressure on the travel industry (for example, it seems madness that every single family in England is forced to compete for the same week’s holiday in May half term). This could be done regionally, as it is in France and Germany, where different ‘zones’ or states have different holiday dates for certain times of the year, in order to help manage capacity and overcrowding (for example, at ski resorts). Alternatively, the government could encourage schools with more flexibility – particularly free schools, academies and independent schools – to avoid school holiday calendar ‘hotspots’, or group together inset days to give families more opportunities for extended weekends away.
Our current system will never be an effective deterrent for families whilst the savings for term-time holidays are so substantial. Increasing the cost of the fines has only proven the limit of economic incentives without other social motivations, and so if we want the madness to end, we must stop doing the same thing over and over again whilst expecting different results.
Comments