In praise of term-time trips to Disney World

HANDS up those who think parents do a grave disservice to their children by taking them on holiday during term time. The landmark case taken by Jon Platt, who whisked his six-year-old daughter off for a week in Disney World Florida, may help you decide.

Platt has just lost his appeal in the UK Supreme Court, running up a bill of thousands of pounds for his trouble and inadvertently helping to copperfasten strict school-attendance rules in Britain.

From now on, it’s a criminal offence if children don’t attend school every day, except during illness or exceptional circumstances.

The fallout from Platt’s David-and-Goliath battle on his young daughter has, however, undoubtedly been beneficial.

If her father’s passionate speech outside the courts is anything to go by, she has had an early and valuable lesson in the search for justice, the painstakingly slow pace of the legal process and the ultimate futility of raging against the machine.

NOT bad for his daughter, who is now eight years old. Indeed, not a bad result at all from an outwardly frivolous trip to meet Mickey Mouse and Cinderella. At this rate, she will be giving lessons in the schoolyard on Walt Disney and the power of US cultural imperialism.

The dilemma of holidays during term time rears its head at this time of the year when cashstrapped families look to save a few bob, rather than suffer extreme price-gouging by travel and airline companies during July and August.

In this country, parents are reported to the Child and Family Agency if their child is absent from school for more than 20 days.

Fines and custodial sentences are imposed on those who ignore the authorities and, while we have yet to produce a crusader like Jon Platt, it is still a divisive issue among parents and schools.

Most families know exactly what they are doing when they take their children away.

They have weighed up the cons of them falling behind in maths against the pros of foreign travel, culturally enriching trips to galleries or the restorative power of a sunkissed week after a long, bleak winter.

But the rules are, as always, tailored towards the feckless few, who would have their children on permanent holiday in the local shopping centre if it wasn’t for the long arm of the law.

There is no mention of school attendance in the research into academic attainment.

The number of books in a home and the mother’s educational level are two of the key factors in scholarly achievement.

In other words, homes where education doesn’t stop and start at the classroom door but continues through the day are most likely to produce children with a love of learning.

Draconian attendance rules enforce the dreary idea that real education only occurs in schools, and that taking time out is a high-risk gamble. There is nothing stopping families who travel in term time taking a schoolbook in the luggage if they are concerned about school progress.

I’M SURE I’m not the first parent to discover how spelling power improves much faster on a beach in Italy, with the promise of gelato, than when children are toiling away in a classroom. Yet our overly regimented system behaves as if parents are irresponsible school children who have to be coerced into giving their offspring a decent education.

The vast majority of Irish families take education seriously – indeed, perhaps too much so.

Who, after all, does the term ‘helicopter parent’ describe – term-time jetsetters or those who hover over their children until they are in university?