Parenting

I was fined for taking my child to Jamaica, but I'm one of the lucky ones | Kehinde Andrews


When it came to power in 1997, Labour picked up and ran with the Tories’ individualistic reforms to the school system. Along with school choice, league tables and academies, in came parental responsibility for absences. So I was disappointed, but not surprised, to be given a fixed penalty notice of £60 per parent as a result of taking our six-year-old out of school for two weeks during term time to visit Jamaica.

The fact that my son will have the chance to engage with world renowned scholars during that time (as I’m going for work on a writing retreat) meant nothing to the local authority. It is deemed less valuable than sitting in his classroom, thinking about next year’s Sats. This is a reminder that we have replaced education with schooling, putting a premium on the state-mandated curriculum rather than the much wider world of learning. But as annoying as it is to be penalised for taking my child out of school, it’s not really parents like me who are the targets of the non-attendance punishment industry.

The 1996 Education Act criminalised non-attendance, and Labour’s introduction of Parenting Orders in 1998 made parents liable for their children’s offences. By making non-attendance a safeguarding issue that all schools had to account for, Labour unleashed the weight of the law on to parents. It is estimated that in 2016-17 more than £24m was paid in fines by parents in England and Wales whose children did not attend or were taken out of school in term time, and that in 2017-18 local authorities issued 223,000 penalty notices for unauthorised holidays. The logic and impact of this approach is to punish the disadvantaged children it is meant to protect.

To understand the motivation behind this look no further than David Cameron. His government believed it had identified the 120,000 so called “troubled families” who caused the majority of social problems in the country. He accused them of “a culture of disruption and irresponsibility” that had “cascaded through [the] generations”. This is the classic “cycle of deprivation” logic, which argues behavioural change can snap people of their poverty.

One of the performance indicators Cameron’s government set for local authorities was whether children were attending school. It’s a pretty simple formula: get the feckless parents to ensure their feral kids get educated so they can have the skills needed for the modern economy drilled into them, get a job and stop sponging off the state. So local authorities installed a rigid no-unauthorised-leave policy. Fining parents has the added bonus of raising much-needed revenue for the depleted school system.

The reality is that children are disadvantaged not only because of their parents’ life choices but also by the system itself. Class and racial inequalities are far older than universal schooling. As a parent of four black children I have no faith in schools to educate them. As much as there are great teachers, the school system is something we work with our children to navigate and survive.

When schools levy fines for non-attendance it is pretty obvious who this will impact. Those 120,000 families whose children are more likely to truant are some of the poorest in the country. And whatever I think of the system as it is currently formulated, it does make sense to encourage children to go to school. But financially punishing poor parents is a step in the wrong direction. Worshipping at the altar of attendance can also have the unintended consequence that sick children and those with special additional needs are less able to achieve the rewards schools hand out to those who always make it to class.

It is time to abandon the Dickensian logic behind criminalising non-attendance and actually focus on the real problem. The school system has been more guilty of entrenching social inequalities than addressing them. If the schools lived up to their stated aims perhaps fewer parents and children would see them as a place they need to escape from.

Kehinde Andrews is professor of black studies at Birmingham City University. He is author of Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century



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