A mum-of-three who is homeschooling her kids for three months so her family can go on holiday without the threat of court action has branded the government “a dictatorship” after being fined £480 in January for taking them to Portugal in term time.
Jewellery designer Rachel Smith, 43, and her husband Stuart Smith, 41, who runs Airbnb properties, had already booked two family breaks with their children – Owen, nine, Ruby, seven and Zac, five – which involved missing four days of the school term, when they received the first fine.
One is an overnight trip to Legoland and the other an Easter holiday to Lanzarote.
Rather than live in fear of incurring further fines or court action and a criminal record, the couple, of Bridgewater, Somerset, deregistered their children from school for a term, to teach them at home. They plan to reregister them so they can go back in May.
Rachel tells The Mirror : “We’re homeschooling our three children for a few months just so that we can go on a couple of affordable holidays. We’d be missing a total of four days off school this term. We had no choice but to take them out and homeschool them. What do you think? Let us know in the comments
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“We’d already been fined £480 and we were worried about getting a large fine and possible criminal record if we didn’t.
“I was really worried about court action, because I know of lots of people this has happened to. My anxiety was so high I couldn’t sleep. I never intended to homeschool my children, but it’s the only choice we have.
‘We went on holiday to Portugal earlier this year – we’d planned to come back the day after they were due at school but we ended up extending it by a week – and got fined hundreds of pounds.
“Going to Legoland for one night during term time will cost £400, but going in the Easter holidays is £700. By going to Portugal in January we managed to get flights for just £20 per person. You can never get flights for anything like that in the school holidays.”
The Smiths’ experience comes as the most recent government statistics (for 2023-24) show a record number of fines were given to parents in England for their children’s absence from school. Of the 487,344 fines issued, 91% were for unauthorised family holidays.
If these fixed penalty notices go unpaid, or have been previously issued, parents face court – with 28,296 parents prosecuted over their children’s school attendance during the same period.
Rachel says: “I think the government has been very heavy-handed – it feels like a dictatorship. How should the government be allowed to be in control of your children? The government is choosing to make it so that people can’t have a holiday.
“I don’t think holidays are a luxury – they are so important for the wellbeing of the family.
“And the kids learn so much from having these experiences that we couldn’t afford to do at other times.”
Rachel’s views are reflected in a petition urging the government to allow families to take their children on term-time holidays for up to 10 days a year, which has gathered 100,000 signatures.
Backing the petition, Rachel adds: “I understand that the government needs to crack down on truancy, but we are just wanting to give our kids educational experiences. There shouldn’t be a one-size fits all approach.”
To register her children for school in May, Rachel has to first reapply and wait for a decision, which can take up to three weeks.
“In order to homeschool, I had to write a letter saying I was deregistering them,” she says. “I was told that the school couldn’t guarantee that there would be places available when they tried to come back. But it’s a small school and not oversubscribed, so we should be ok.”
Meanwhile, homeschooling has made life far more flexible.
Rachel, who shares the responsibility with Stuart, does times tables and spelling at 8.15am, followed by a walk from 9am to 11am. After lunch, between 12.30 and 2pm, the children have free time, playing, with a bit of TV.
At 2pm, they have art, until 3.30pm when they visit family or friends, or go to a kids’ club, followed by dinner at 5pm, one TV programme at 6pm, then reading for an hour at 6.30pm and bed at 8pm.
“We might do half an hour of maths in the morning and then go for a walk or we might do it at 6pm,” says Rachel. “We fit the learning in when it is right time for them. If they are not in the mood to do maths one day then we won’t do any that day.
“We used to go to an Airbnb for the weekend and have to rush back on Sunday night for school, but now we can do things on the beach the next day and create family memories. There is so much more flexibility.”
Rachel, who reckons they save between £3,000 and £5,000 a year by taking holidays in term time, adds: “We will have no hesitation in doing it again – either later this year or next year – if I feel the kids would benefit from a holiday.
“Children are only little once.”
The Mirror has approached the Department for Education for comment.
Where do you stand on Rachel and Stuart’s predicament? Two Mirror commentators have given their opinions on short-term homeschooling. Let us know what you think in the comments below.
“Parents aren’t necessarily cut out to be teachers”
Jade Zammit, mum of two and sleep coach at Beyondthestars.co.uk, says:
“While I completely agree there will be times when it’s necessary to pull children out of school for short trips, I couldn’t envision doing it for a whole term. For me, the disruption to their routine far outweighs any financial savings we might make on holidays.
My eldest, who is eight, thrives on routine, and we see a huge shift in him after the summer holidays when he’s readjusting to going back to school. It often takes him a few weeks to get back into the swing of things, so pulling him out for a full term would really add to that.
Many kids would struggle with being out of school for too long and not having that routine. Having set school holidays helps them regulate mentally and emotionally.
I would also worry about the impact short-term homeschooling would have on their social skills: being with peers is so important at that age, they learn real life lessons from being around their friends, going through the developmental and hormonal changes at primary age.
As we saw from the Covid lockdowns, keeping children isolated from their friends isn’t good for them, mentally or socially. Being away from normality for so long builds their anxiety, so normal day-to-day interactions can become quite fraught. It becomes a much bigger ‘thing’ for them going back to normal afterwards.
Finally, I’m not a teacher – that’s a valuable skill, but one not everyone has. Parents might find they’re not cut out to teach their children all the subjects they need to know. That could mean they’d face even more upheaval in their formative years – that’s not a risk I’d personally be willing to take.”
“Travel companies hiking up prices in the school holidays is nothing short of criminal”
Mirror columnist and dad Darren Lewis, says:
“Homeschooling is no joke. I should know.
In the penultimate year of my son’s primary school education, my wife and I took an extensively considered step of removing him.
Behaviour in his class was abysmal. We’d had several meetings with his teacher, the deputy head and the head to no avail.
So, rather than see him held back through no fault of his own, we took him out. We set up a timetable at home identical to the one he’d had at school, we tuned in to appropriate online material to address areas we couldn’t and he played football as part of a team three times a week anyway. So his physical and social needs were met.
More parents do it than you know. Especially this age of empowerment where mums and dads prioritise the emotional and academic well-being of their kids over teachers’ empty promises.
Teachers are walking away from the profession because they are demoralised. Overworked and underpaid with class sizes impossible to manage and social problems they should not have to deal with.
All that said, I would never have taken him out permanently to go on holiday.
I totally sympathise – and agree – with parents frustrated at the travel companies ripping them off by hiking prices unforgivably when school is out for the holidays. It is nothing short of criminal.
People who want to demonise parents don’t take into account their commitment to maintaining the ways and means for their kids to keep learning.
We’ve taken ours out to go on holiday on occasion before. But we’ve sought permission beforehand from the head of their secondary school. It sounds very much as though a conversation is needed between Rachel and her children’s headteacher.”
You can sign the petition to Parliament here.
