Ministers want parent fines to always be considered if a child has any unauthorised term-time holiday, is spotted in public while excluded or has more than five days of unauthorised absence in any one term.
The Department for Education says this should include absence through being late to 10 sessions in a term.
It is now consulting on these measures as part of its plan to bring in national standards to end what it describes as a “postcode lottery” over when fines are issued.
The consultation launched today also proposes that schools be required to inform their local authority about pupils absent for sickness for 15 days or more, to “help make sure that no matter the reason for absence, the right support can be put in place”.
The DfE has said that most schools and local authorities will already work together in this way.
School absence: the ‘postcode lottery’ of parent fines
And it asks for views on schools being required to keep electronic, rather than paper, registers, to make sure that data can be shared easily and securely with government, local authorities and academy trusts.
The government says this will ensure that “no child falls through the cracks in the system”.
Education secretary Nadhim Zahawi said: “I know from the children’s commissioner’s work on school attendance that children themselves hugely value being in school with their teachers and their friends.
“My job is to make sure that every child can get those school experiences. The plans set out today to reform how absence fines operate, alongside our Schools Bill currently going through Parliament, will improve consistency across the country and help tackle persistent absence.”
The consultation sets out the circumstances in which the DfE wants penalty notices to be considered. These are:
- Ten sessions of unauthorised absence, including lateness, in a term (where support has not been successful, has not been engaged with or is not appropriate).
- Any incidence of unauthorised holiday in term time.
- Any sessions of unauthorised absence immediately following a leave of absence in term time.
- Any incidence of an excluded pupil being in a public place without reasonable justification during the first five school days of an exclusion.
The DfE is asking for the public’s views on whether it agrees with these thresholds.
Earlier this year it consulted on creating a new national framework for using legal intervention over pupil absence.
It is going ahead with this plan despite the majority of parents who responded objecting to it.
Fixed-penalty notices are out-of-court settlements offered to parents who have committed the offence of failing to secure their child’s regular attendance at school.
Currently, each local authority decides the thresholds at which it will issue a penalty notice. The DfE says this means that enforcement for an absence may be taken against a parent living in one local authority area but the same absence would not be subject to enforcement in a neighbouring authority area.
Subject to Parliamentary approval, ministers want to introduce national thresholds at which penalty notices must be considered.
However, local authorities will remain independent prosecutors.
The DfE consultation also asks people if they agree that the maximum number of penalty notices that can be issued to each parent, per pupil, should be two per academic year.
