Fining feckless parents for school absences is not working - Jayne Dowle
Amongst all the proud parents sharing their shiny ‘first day at school’ posts on Facebook last week, one stood out. It was from a distant acquaintance and showed a picture of her teenage son by a swimming pool with what looked suspiciously like a beer in hand - ‘First Day of Year 9’ it said.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen similar posts and she’s certainly not the only one bragging that her kids are too cool for school this September.
No wonder the number of penalty notices for school absences reached a record high of almost 500,000 in the 2024-25 school year, according to new analysis by the Sunday Times newspaper.
There is definitely a certain contingent of feckless parents who delight in taking their children on holiday abroad at the beginning of September, to stick two fingers up at their schools and also save money on out of season package trips.
For them, coming home to school absence fines - typically starting at £80 if paid within 21 days in England - is as much as a rite of passage as unpacking the suitcases and shaking sand out of trainers.
Whether these parents pay them or not is often questionable. The long, grinding process of ignoring fines and being further punished is clogging up the already overloaded criminal justice system. Experts warn that persistent school absence offenders - some of whom end up in magistrates’ courts - are a growing menace.
School absence cases made up 2.9 per cent of cases sentenced at magistrates’ courts last year, up from 1.4 per cent in 2017, according to the analysis.
After two fines, the local authorities must consider prosecution for a third offence. Conviction can result in fines of up to £2,500, a community order or even a jail sentence. Reaching this situation is rare, only 148 penalty notices last year out of 493,000 were for exceeding two fines, the analysis found. The vast majority of prosecutions arise from non-payment of an initial fine.
More than nine in 10 of such penalty notices are issued for families taking holidays during term time, according to the Department for Education.
Sadly, parents in the north of England are the worst offenders, with Middlesbrough council reporting the highest prosecution rate for unauthorised absence penalty notices in the country. Almost one in four of these cases ended up in court for non-payment of the initial fine in 2024-25.
Stuart Nolan, a criminal defence lawyer and chair of the Law Society’s criminal law committee, says that the huge number of cases involving parents whose children are absent from school, many of whom do not show up for their court hearing, is putting massive pressure on the backlog in magistrates’ courts, leaving perpetrators of serious crimes still at large. “There’s an awful lot more serious things that aren’t getting dealt with because of these matters,” Nolan argues. “Court time is being taken up.”
Flouting basic rules of parenthood - ensuring that their children attend school - and flouting the system by non-payment of fines and repeat offending, when parents set such a moral compass, is it a surprise that so many of our young people are lawless and end up without direction in life?
Taking children out of school to go on holiday, especially when they’re teenagers fully cognisant with the motivations and implications of such action is not only damaging to their education.
It clearly gives them the message that school, and therefore authority, is optional. Politicians and policy-makers spending valuable time scratching their heads over why we have so many NEETs (young people not in education, employment or training) should think on this. Fining parents for school absence clearly makes little difference and puts pressure on our already over-burdened courts.
What, however, is the alternative? No fines at all? Jonathan Brash, Labour MP for Hartlepool, where almost 15 penalty notices are issued for every 100 pupils, the third highest rate in the country, supports the Fight School Fines campaign, which is lobbying to end penalties. Its petition in support of abolishing fines passed 100,000 signatures last month, so will be considered for a debate in parliament.
Brash argues that fines do not work and make parents “feel they are being treated like criminals”. If you take the longest view, there may be some logic to this argument. Treat parents like criminals and it’s arguable that as they rail against the system they will entrench the same attitude in their children. And that’s but a short step to multi-generational criminality.