Re the possibility of criminalising parents who take children out of school in term time (Report, 1 February). It is a strange mindset that thinks that education takes place only in school, but if that is the case I want people to consider the frictions caused in schools by departments taking children out of school.
In my time as a head of English, I received complaints from GCSE teachers because the geography department was taking children for week-long field trips to Swanage. I also received complaints from the history and geography departments when the English department organised trips to theatre matinees. When at school myself I did not seem to suffer overmuch from truanting quite often to get relief from teachers who thought that examinations required endless practice at taking examinations.
The concentration on tests and examinations creates a kind of tunnel vision that loses sight of education, which can and will take place wherever a child is, whether in school or at the seaside in term time.
John Fullman
London
• While nobody wishes to see children’s education suffer from prolonged holidays in term time, it is pointless to have a complete ban. A child who suffers a couple of weeks’ illness doesn’t suffer irreversible damage to its career. Nor does a child who goes on holiday with its parents. It is prolonged and frequent periods that are the problem. Why not therefore introduce a rationing system? A child is allowed x number of weeks over its school lifetime in periods of no longer than two or three weeks at a time. Once the ration has been used up, the entitlement disappears.
This would enable visits to relatives overseas and the occasional cheaper trip out of term time and all the other justifiable reasons why occasionally families might want to do something out of term time. But it would also prevent abuse of the system.
Arthur Gould
Loughborough
• State schools in England are open to pupils for 190 days. Arguments used in the Isle of Wight case justify a 90% attendance rate. This means that pupils can miss 19 school days (almost four school weeks) during term time! Is this acceptable? Ofsted inspections look unfavourably on school attendance rates below 95%. Headteachers have to face yet another impossible task in dealing with this dilemma.
Bogumit Polachowski
Greasby, Wirral
• It’s all very well to take children out of school during term time, even for valid reasons, but to do so is to be subsidised by parents who pay the higher rates.
David Prothero
Harlington, Bedfordshire
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