MODERN FAMILY

SON junior might only be eight years old, but that hasn’t stopped him drawing up big plans to travel the world.

Thanks to his growing football card collection with facts about his heroes and their places of birth, his itinerary includes Barcelona, Madrid, France, Brazil and Argentina.

Not only is it a good for his geography skills, we are also using the opportunity to teach him a lesson in finance and budgeting.

Holidays are expensive enough, and it has not been helped by last week’s landmark ruling in the Supreme Court that means parents who take children on holiday during term time could face fixed-penalty charges or even prosecution.

Judges ruled that dad Jon Platt, who took his six-year-old daughter on week-long holiday to Florida in 2015, should have paid a fine for her unauthorised absence.

The verdict means that parents who take their kids from school for a term-time holiday, even if that child has impeccable attendance, can be prosecuted if they don’t get permission from the principal.

The educational experts are right – if everyone took their children off to France for a week during school time there would certainly be chaos in our classrooms.

But we all know that the majority of parents are not going to jet off on four holidays a year during term time and they realise the importance of education.

It really shouldn’t be the parents that the courts are coming after. What about the holiday firms in all of this?

With holiday companies and airlines often upping their prices during the holidays, it is something that is becoming increasingly out of reach for many families.

I did a quick search of holidays from Cardiff to Portugal this summer and found that if we were to go for a week in June it would be £800 cheaper than going to exactly the same place, for exactly the same length of time two months later in the height of the school holidays.

Taking your child out of school for a holiday is fundamentally wrong, but so too is government policy that does nothing to address travel firms quadrupling their prices during holiday periods.

Hitting parents in the pocket, is an easy option. The cynic might see it as another form of stealth tax and personally, I am not convinced it does anything to alter the habits of families who have a regular issue, for whatever reason, with failing to get their child to school.

No wonder then that many parents take the decision to take their children out of school in order to afford the kind of break that will only enhance a child’s understanding of the world.