My Child, My Holiday, My Rules!

Before my first baby was born I couldn’t imagine how life would be with a baby in the mix. You’re pregnant, you can feel this baby moving and yet trying to figure out exactly what life will be like when they arrive? Well, unfathomable isn’t it?!

She was due over Christmas and I remember saying “if the baby comes before New Year’s Eve” I think I’ll go out, my Mum will sit for us.” I had no idea! As it happened she didn’t arrive in time for me to even consider a party with a days old baby, Florence was born at 11.40pm on New Year’s Eve and I saw in 2010 watching snow falling outside my hospital window, as fireworks simultaneously exploded into the night sky, ringing in not just a new month, New Year and new decade, but a whole new me. I was changed, as we all are in that moment of holding our baby for the first time, forever more. And then I knew!

I didn’t leave her for nearly 2 years, not really. Not for any great length of time at any rate, and certainly not over night. I never wanted to put her down, and the rod I kept being told I was making for my own back, it just felt like a strong support system to me.

She never wanted me out of her sight, but how could I mind? I didn’t want her out of mine either!

I discovered that being with my children is just the most glorious pleasure. Teaching them, showing them, spending time together. I think I really found myself becoming a Mummy and I wanted lots more children to fill my tribe. Florence is the eldest of four, we went onto have Jimmy in 2012, Raffie in 2017 and baby Posie was born in 2021 meaning even thought she’s now four, she will always be “baby Posie”.

And family time, us being together, oh its so important. I long for the school holidays now that three of my children are in the system. I wish they didn’t have to be because I miss them, but they are, and so instead, I look forward to each break with glee before feeling all the glum when one finishes. I mean, I get it, and I don’t want to home school (lock down taught me any fanciful ideas I may have had about my competence in that direction were ill founded) but wouldn’t it be nice eh?!

My husband is a primary school teacher, and in that we are so lucky to be afforded all that beautiful time together when they do all break up and I finally get them back on my time after all the rushing around during term. We are so lucky, lots of families don’t have time to stop and be together like we do, to be afforded that precious time as a unit which is so nourishing for our souls. In fact, the way our system works now, most families simply have to have an invitation or prescription to stop and just be.

It’s a world we live in now where both parents often have to work, a lot of the time in a tag team system, meaning weekdays are ships in the night, followed by weekends being taken over by shifts, football, dance… And with most families, unlike my own, also working in school holiday time, the only moments they get to be a family, doing nothing but loving each other’s company and attention, is when they book a break and physically go away somewhere – with half the joy of that break actually being the looking forward to it. However, have you SEEN the price of a holiday when the schools are no longer in session?! They are, I would say, inaccessible to most working families (including teachers who have no options but to travel when they are not in contractual obligation to work).

Holidays during the summer holidays especially, are reserved for elite earners, even, when taken within the UK!

I call it daylight robbery when UK holiday companies like Center Parcs can charge upwards of 4 times the price within a school break than that of the same holiday in a midweek term time setting. Last week, for example, during the UK February half term, Center Parcs Elveden Forest were charging £429 for a 4 night break as a family of four in their most basic accommodation. The exact same holiday this week was priced at £1649 – SCANDALOUS!

I’ve spoken to (ONLY) one person (who has no vested interest) that says it’s simply economics and they have no problem with the price hikes for school holiday breaks. They believe, they said, that not everyone SHOULD be able to go on every holiday.

I agree to the extent being everyone’s earnings are different.

However, I think a 4 night break, in a wooden hut, inside a barbed wired area of a forest in Suffolk should be accessible to all working families. If you work hard and can’t afford that then something is wrong, not with your earnings but with the prices of the breaks in the first place!

And yet a school holiday stay at Center Parcs UK is not accessible to the vast majority of us. Unless we take our children out of school, facing fines, or even prosecution along with the stigma that potentially comes with that, most of us can kiss goodbye to being able to stay in the home of the “subtropical swimming paradise” (a name which made my Mum once exclaim “their idea of paradise and mine differs wildly”) at all.

I then, have absolutely no qualms about taking my children out of school for a break. In light of the fact cost means it’s the difference between being able to have a holiday or not, I’m all for bunking them off. In principle. Personally, I can’t of course, because as I mentioned, my husband is a teacher, and sadly, we can’t just suck up a fine for him not going to work (he’d lose his job) but boy, if we could, I most certainly would! It would actually be cheaper for him to have unpaid leave (again, a theory – teachers are not allowed to do this), pay child school fines and go on holiday in term time, than it is to take a family break in the summer!

Why do I feel so strongly?!

Holidays, that time as a family, perhaps seeing a new culture (or not but just being away), well… This is an important part of life. Sitting on a beach, eating dinner together, laughing, these are things we all need.

Knowing your parents, siblings, Grandparents… All absolutely invaluable in terms of well-being, but also as part of life’s education. Set away from a classroom doesn’t mean learning isn’t possible. Not being in a specific lesson doesn’t mean that brains and minds aren’t being expanded.

We are so very black and white when it comes to our education “rules” and yet nearly nothing in life, other than perhaps a manifesto written by a middle class white man of privilege, is actually in black and white.

We work in colour, human beings need that in fact. And what’s more than this, is that each of us vibes from different hues even. We are all on similar pages, just perhaps reading different parts of the story, because one size very rarely will fit all. We learn all the time regardless of how, and often life lessons are delivered the most sweetly when gently drifting into our ether through ways we couldn’t have planned on in a curriculum.

And it’s long been a bone of contention, this fining for taking children out of school. I haven’t known many parents who are on board with it, and I’ve talked to a lot over the past couple of weeks meaning a few may have made themselves known to me, but they haven’t. They must exist I suppose, but it would be my guess that the majority want autonomy over choosing when to take their children out of school to a degree. Often parents don’t understand how schooling works, that’s apparent. Some think of it as free childcare and consider teachers as lazy louts with superb holidays, not realising that though yes, the holidays are wonderful, all teachers work through every single one of them, despite not being paid. That’s the story of a teacher’s life in fact. They’re paid on a pro rate basis, but quite literally only for certain hours on Monday to Friday, during term time only. Holidays, weekends, evenings? That’s when they work (yes, all of them) for free.

And sometimes parents pipe up with a wild plan for shorter summers and longer half term breaks, seeing that it most definitely works for their childcare situation, but not maybe how both teachers and children burn out, and need an extended break to reset. Nevertheless, I digress, we are not allowed to take our children out of school for 10 sessions in a rolling 10 week period, without facing a fine. It used to be 10 consecutive sessions meaning you could take them out on a Monday afternoon for the rest of the week but because they’d registered for Monday morning they’d only miss 9.5. A legal loophole if you will, and it was all at the school’s discretion; some fined, some didn’t. The rules changed recently and though you can still do that, only taking 9.5 sessions, thus being at school for the tenth, for the next 9 weeks you have to be super careful because miss one more and fining is now not within the school’s hands (apparently), now the authority dictates.

Not, I might add, that schools see any of the money made in fines – this is all, as far as I can gather from my investigations, spent on administering the fines in the first place and fighting against those parents who will dig their heels in and refuse to pay them. Good for those who fight it I say! Though on odd occasions examples have been made of such parents, taking them to court and threatening them with prison, the general consensus seems to be “put up enough of a fight and it will eventually be dropped”! Which is interesting, because we’ve been led to believe this is such a frightening process we need to just cough up. From the parents who messaged me on social media after talking about this subject, it sounds much like those privately owned car parks who issue fines for parking longer than allowed. When you dig deeper with those private car parks it appears there isn’t much authority, meaning if you simply don’t pay it, you may be threatened, and quite frighteningly so, but they seem to eventually fade away. You’ve got to have balls and gumption though.

So, in light of everything I’ve read, and heard from parents (and teachers) who have messaged me about this, I’d say we all need to just say no to fines, stand tall as a nation and choose safety in numbers. If we all say no, what can they do? Put us ALL in prison? Oh I think not, even hardened criminals don’t get custodial sentences, there’s no money in the system for that! So I’d say stop discussing the merits of having a holiday vs not having one, the cost being abhorrent in term time and how holiday companies need to be regulated (they won’t be) and just do it, take control, this is your life, your children, your holiday!

I spoke on the BBC twice on this very topic before half term and I mentioned both times that when I was growing up we could apply for up to ten days a year for a holiday. This was granted on a bespoke basis and I think that’s the only decent thing to offer parents of today too. To not penalise on any specific criteria like attendance (there’s already far too much emphasis on sending children to school at any cost) but for schools to have the power to make decisions on a case by case basis – this is ultimately what standing up and being counted, taking a holiday and refusing to pay a fine, will work towards. I also spoke about holiday companies and how I only knew of one personally (Wroxham Barns – where I have booked for the summer holidays myself – in Norfolk) who don’t price hike in busier times. I’ve subsequently asked on two different platforms (where I’ve received many messages about this issue), if anyone knows of any others so that I can share their details too. I’ve had none! I’m not saying there aren’t any more in the country but I’ve had ZERO, recommendations for anywhere else I can share as somewhere who charge the same price whatever the weather. Go figure. Economics again.

So seriously, what choice do parents have? Working parents DO deserve to have a reasonably priced holiday at a fairly simple venue like Center Parcs. Family time and the ability to be a unit should not be for the elite earners only. We all NEED a break. So, we have no choice but to break rules and lie in order to get what we deserve. I don’t lie in any other walk of life by the way, I make that a policy actually, but when it comes to the good of my family in a situation like this, I’d break my own rules if I had to, and if I could.

When Florence went to school it broke my heart a bit knowing she was going into a system and I’d never get her out of it. Just like when she was born, when I realised I never wanted to let her go, that I hadn’t cherished the time enough of it being just me and her in my tummy, before she became a part of the world and I had to share her with everyone else, I’d not invested enough thought into how little time I had with her before school would eat her up. It’s one step closer to being in the rat race forever when they take their first patent shoed steps into a classroom, but we do still have the power to say “they are our children, not yours, we will bring them up as we see fit”.

Take control, if you can go on holiday and only in term time, then I say do it. And don’t pay the fines either – dig those heels in and instead of being made an example of yourself, make an example of the system, if enough of us do it, things will have to change.

Children are born to us when we have no idea how they will change our lives, and then everything suddenly becomes about them and we don’t even mind because we find that we are born again ourselves. There’s very few parents who don’t put their children first in absolutely everything, because most of us are good. We don’t sacrifice our babies, we make sacrifices FOR them and if taking a holiday is the very worst of it, then by golly won’t they be lucky!