Mum furious over criminal record after taking daughter out of school to visit sick gran
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mum-school-holiday-criminal-record-37163490
Posted by Forward-Answer-4407
Mum furious over criminal record after taking daughter out of school to visit sick gran
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/mum-school-holiday-criminal-record-37163490
Posted by Forward-Answer-4407
41 Comments
So I just have an incredibly lax school? In the same circumstances I filled out a form beforehand and all was well
I’m totally with the mother in this, and good for her for not paying the fine and then going to the media.
And also I don’t care if she knew and took her anyway. Family comes first.
Seems she wasn’t taken to court for taking her child in on an unapproved holiday. Instead she was taken to court for failing to pay the 80 pound fine.
What she should have done, is either pay the fine or contest it. I think it was the do nothing strategy that ended her here.
That said, it is absurd that criminal prosecutions for violent offences are taking up to 5 years to get to court, and they waste time on this sort of thing.
She claims this is the first time she had taken her child out of school. Surely someone in this whole sorry process could have had the common sense to let her off with a warning before to came to court, at significant cost to the public, particularly given she had what seems to me, to be a reasonable justification.
I’m really not a fan of this fine for taking your kids out of school for a holiday thing. It disproportionate affects the poor. Is there any evidence that it works?
One of the worst laws ever passed was allowing local authorities to fine parents for taking their children out of school. What the hell was a 10 year old going to learn during a few days off school?
Where I live the schools don’t care – my daughter regularly takes her children (10 and 15) out of school for long weekends to go and see their grandfather who has cancer.
>“I was given a 12-month suspended sentence – drug dealers often get a six-month suspended sentence. How can drug dealers have more lenient sentences? How is that fair? Our legal system is a joke.”
She’s not wrong.
There are children in my kids’ classes at school (year 1 and year 5) who regularly go back to India to see family, often eating into school time. But there’s an understanding that sometimes holidays don’t align, and that there are Hindu festivals at certain times of year, so there’s some wiggle room. I suspect there’s something else going on here.
TLDR: Classic FAFO. Applied for holiday leave, took the word of a receptionist that it would be “fine”, went on holiday anyway without confirmation from the school and then landed home to a fine she refused to pay out of “principle”. 🙄
So he hadn’t seen his daughter in seven years, she had never met the granddaughter.
What a family.
You know I read this article ready to grand-stand as an ex-teacher but this poor woman. The headline is misleading, she was taken to court for refusing to pay an absence fine, not for actually taking her kid out of school to visit a sick relative. She stuck up for herself and I’m glad she went to the media about it. I knew children who were absent for weeks on end because of shitty parents and they weren’t fined. I had two students be granted permission for leave under exceptional circumstances because a girl went to a dance audition in Spain. Her and older brother got 2 weeks off. Approved. All it was, was the girl attending a dance audition for one afternoon at some studio.
JFC…. I went looking for what I thought would be the “missing missing reasons” of her having a history of terrible attendance – nope –
“Sahara’s school attendance was almost perfect and she had won awards for her attendance each year,”
What an absolute joke of a system and dystopian nightmare. Good on her I’d have done exactly the same….. Except I’d make damn sure I had an excellent lawyer….. Although in reality now I just know not to give them a heads up and just call them in sick on a self cert for a week 🙄
Using a dying woman you’ve never met to have a two week holiday in Turkey is pretty scummy behaviour.
Refusing to pay the fine “out of principle” was just plain stupid – contest it at least.
Woman faces the consequences of her own actions is the headline here, not any crocodile tears “morality” defence.
IF the facts are as represented here this does feel like an overreach, especially as she’s saying it was just once, to see someone gravely ill so it had to be then and that she was informally told by the school admin it should be fine.
However I’m getting massive missing info alarm bells here because this seems to be extremely one sided and the response does seem out of proportion for just one absence if thats the case. She claims it was just once though.
It’s an utterly garbage law anyway. Unduly and unjustly penalises lots of people, and indirectly penalises everyone else because holiday companies scalp them.
But no government will repeal it now, because the media will screech that they’re “lowering standards” or some bullshit like that. Conveniently forgetting that attainment was fine and had been climbing before the last came in.
Should have just paid the fine like the rest of us do?
She gave them 20 days notice so she could have taken the daughter in August ie school
Holidays if it was a genuine emergency. There’s definitely an element of choosing to go in September as it’s cheaper.
Stupid rule. If she’d deregistered her daughter she could have fucked off anywhere in the world for months on end with zero educational supervision! When homeschooling is so unregulated, it’s ridiculous to punish parents with school kids whose attendance is usually excellent for a trip like that.
I did this once, told the school a family member was sick and flew to Mexico for a two week holiday to avoid the ridiculous air fees during school time.
When we got back my son went to school and drew a picture of the beech lol my son clearly grassed me up but nobody said anything.
She got 12 months because she took the matter to court. The courts get pissed when you don’t pay the £80 fine because courts cost a ton of money to run. She got the sentence to try and tell other parents not to think the courts will let them off £80 fines.
It’s only a certain amount of unauthorised absences that can lead to a fine. Most people understand that taking your child out of school during term time for a 2 week holiday (or to see your mother in law who you haven’t seen for 10 years) is cheaper than taking them during the 13 weeks school holidays. They factor the fine into this cost and it’s still cheaper. So they pay the fine. This avoids going to Court and having to practice sad faces for newspaper photos.
Right, this really makes UK population look like a cattle with freedome being just an illusion.
I’m just begging people to read the damned article before pontificating in either for/against the mother here. Every comment I’ve read so far I think “they talk about that in the article… this is addressed in the article… it LITERALLY explains it in the article”. People read clickbait headlines and are fighting each other to death in the comments.
Information which is missing from the article:
* When did she find out about the sick grandmother? Could she have made the trip during the summer holidays?
* When in September did she go away? Did a significant portion of the 20 days of notice she gave the school fall during the summer holidays?
* What was the prognosis, why was the decision made to go immediately instead of overlapping the trip with October half term? Or if it needed to be term time due to cost reasons, why did it need to be September, right at the start of the school year?
* What is the current status of the grandmother? I can’t help thinking that if she had passed on since then that’d form part of this woman’s narrative.
* Did she even respond to the fine to contest it or just ignore it?
To me it reads like she’s trying to frame it as a “drop everything” family emergency which she managed as best she could, but in reality she just made bad choices when she planned the trip. She then refused to pay the fine which she received due to her own poor planning, because she felt like her reasons should shield her from consequences.
Then she was taken to court for not paying the fine. Which rather implies she never contested the fine at all.
There must be a massive amount missing from this story. Absolutely does not add up.
Ah yes, schools and their poor tax. Always good to squeeze what you can from working class families. I’m glad this woman got a criminal record. Serves her right for being poor!
Not sure how it’s affected her credits score though
Loads of this story doesn’t add up for the response. Her own comment “Sahara’s school attendance was almost perfect ” which means it wasn’t perfect. The fact that they choose to do something time critical by post is also an odd one but why take the child for 2 weeks. It could easily have been a couple of days instead especially as she hadn’t seen her for 7 years which means the girl was 3 or so when she had last seen her. Can anyone else confirm from their own experiences if a suspended sentence is the norm for something like this on a first offense?
This is BS.
The education system doesn’t own our children, the form should be INFORMING them of the child’s upcoming absence. Not asking permission.
And fines, prosecutions – for kids not being educated at all, extreme cases where parents are depriving their kids of an education, that makes sense. 2 weeks for a kid who otherwise attends?!
No lawyer so they walked all over here in this country its how well you articulate yourself not the level of guilt, and if you have enough money you don’t face justice
She refused to pay the £80 fine and let it escalate. That was dumb.
Well, it’s the weird thing of people demanding that parents be held accountable but when parents are held accountable people get upset….
Quote “On the day of their flight, a letter from the school arrived saying the holiday had not been authorised… but Kay did not see it until she returned home.”
She means, she very carefully “did not see it”
2 weeks though, at the beginning of term? She definitely went on holiday
I sincerely doubt that there isn’t more to this story than what they tell the media.
No school would just ban a student from visiting a dying grandparent or take the parent to court for the first time an unauthorised absence happened.
What pisses me off most about this, is that IF you’re willing to get your children to lie about being ill, you get away with taking them in Mallorca out of term time with no push-back; but if you think that it’s morally better to not make your children lie, then you get absolutely shafted.
As always in this country, people trying to do the right thing get screwed while others get away with breaking the rules with impunity.
There must be a massive amount missing from this story. Absolutely does not add up.
Edit – just to add, this offence on its own absolutely does not warrant a custodial sentence so something is odd there. Even if it did, a suspended sentence consists of two parts- the custodial term and how long it is suspended for. Here, she just says 12 months so that is wrong. It can’t be 12 months custodial period as that exceeds the maximum sentence for this offence. So we don’t even know what the sentence is. The magistrates court would have maximum 3 magistrates not 4 so she has also confused something there, probably also including the legal advisor.
There must be a massive amount missing from this story. Absolutely does not add up.
My guess is she got a 12 month conditional discharge, so a very low sentence.
She didn’t get a suspended prison sentence for taking her daughter out of school. She received it for not paying the fine.
And frankly she deserved the fine. She apparently gave 20 days notice of her request for a September trip, so presumably sent it in August when of course the school was on holiday.
There had been no contact with that side of the family for ten years. What kind of idiot does she think people are that this was all about visiting a dying grandmother for two weeks.
Taking your kids out of school for more than a day here or there is utterly irresponsible. It sends a message to other parents that it’s OK and makes life impossible for teachers.
I’m glad that she got an £80 fine (most of these parents, despite being idiots, just pay up in in acknowledgement that they saved hundreds on their flights) and I’m glad that she got a suspended sentence for her blithe arrogance.
Why couldn’t she go literally few weeks earlier when it was the school holidays ?
Think there needs to be a common sense review on the ability for local authorities to fine parents over time out of school.
I know someone who is currently awaiting a court date because has refused to pay the fine on principle after contesting etc (she’s quite strong willed lol).
Her daughter is in ~final year of primary school~ third year of high school (time flies!), is a carer to her mother and days of absence since starting school up until this point can be counted on your hands and are all illness/caring related.
The time out of school was because she was to be a bridesmaid at a friend’s destination wedding, taking a week off for a rare (school breaks included) holiday and the school said no to her going.
The reason for the refusal was compounded by the fact the school had already allowed another child of foreign descent take multiple weeks off to attend a wedding in their home country.
Suggestions to take it to the press have been refused because she doesn’t want to come across as one of those people or have the case hijacked by certain types
Situation stinks and obviously she’d be better off just paying the fine but she’s too strong willed and principled lol.
Why are people defending taking children out of school for weeks at a time? Do you really consider school to be optional?
You have to have been born yesterday to believe there was a “sick grandmother,” in a holiday destination. She deserves what she got. The kid grows up at least finding out that lying has consequences.