Eduvacation: Absent-Minded Holidays?

A report by the Department for Children, Schools and Families this month has revealed yet again the extent to which parents are taking their children on holiday during term time. But is this a cause for concern, as many people claim, or is it in fact a sign that we need a new, more holistic approach to holidays?

The government, and to a large part the mass media, count the issue of 'truancy' in term-time for holidays as black and white. For them, absences lead to lost learning from which children find it hard to catch up. On a community website for Canterbury, a spokeswoman for Medway Council argued that "Unauthorised absences can have more of an effect than parents realise. Two weeks off in each school year for 12 years is equal to missing two full terms of education, which will have a negative impact on children's success at school and seriously affect their future."

But this very black and white argument isn’t backed up by all teachers and members of the wider education community: records show that for the academic year 2007/2008 family holidays accounted for 6.2 million absent school days, and 86% of these were authorised by head teachers. In other words, a great many school leaders do recognise that the learning and other benefits gained from annual family holidays can be more significant than those for the same period in school.

With the new ('rarely cover') government policies increasing barriers for teachers to take young people on school trips, it can be argued that learning outside the classroom is increasingly under threat. Allowing parents a limited amount of time each year for trips of educational value may in some cases be the main way for some children to learn outside the confines of their school. To some extent this ‘common-sense’ approach is already happening as at the head teacher’s discretion, parents can request up to ‘10 days off’ per year. But where a holiday does not impact upon examinations, and parents can show clear educational value of their planned holiday, schools should  seek to support rather than block the family. There should be a clear agreement between child, parent and school that, apart from in extreme circumstances, term-time holidays must include meaningful learning before the request is granted.

But it must be recognised that kids don’t always learn as much as they could do while away, and that schools need to support parents by providing them with tools to facilitate learning (as is a legal requirement for many other kinds of absences, such as temporary exclusion).

One such tool is the Geography Collective’s Journey Journal, an activity book that, among other things, is aimed at children taking term-time holidays. Where it differs from the vast majority of existing travel activity books for young people is that it asks kids to critically and creatively reflect on their relationships with the people and places they encounter while they’re away.

The publication is aimed at schools, local authorities and parents as a way of offering children fun, creative and exciting new ways of engaging with and learning about the places they visit. Readers are asked to “draw something that is okay in this place, but rude in your place”, colour in a map to show places they find connections to, interview a local person, “create and image of your best experience” and rate their holiday among many other activities.

In doing so, we can simultaneously challenge the idea that a day of learning is lost simply because the young person is not confined to a classroom.

Find out more about The Geography Collective.

Read also our features Fun or Learning, or Both? and Learning Holidays.