As the long school summer break approached its mid-point recently, Margate beach was crowded with families enjoying the brief reprieve between the year’s fourth and fifth heatwaves. For most, thoughts of the classroom were probably not at the forefront of their minds. But for the seven mothers and two fathers who were summoned at 10am to a stuffy room in the town’s magistrates court, set just behind the beachfront strip of arcades, the subject was unavoidable.
They were among hundreds of parents due in courts across England this month for failing to ensure their children had regularly attended school over the course of the last academic year. They faced fines, or in extreme cases the theoretical possibility of three months in prison, depending on the reasons provided for the absences. The first defendant to be called in admitted that he had traveled abroad with his partner and daughter for 10 days at the start of the summer term.
Taking her out of school to go on holiday for the third time in three consecutive years had pushed her annual attendance rate below 75%. But the family had needed a break, he told the court, because two close friends had recently died, and the child’s mother had been unwell. The timing of the trip – immediately after rather than during the Easter holidays – was, he said, prompted by the strain the family had been under, rather than because travel was cheaper during term time.
The three magistrates presiding over court two represented the sharp end of an ongoing drive to try to improve school attendance rates in England, which have never fully recovered after the closure of schools during Covid. Parents can be taken to court as a last resort if gentler attempts by the local authority to help them improve persistently poor attendance have failed, or if they have received multiple penalty notices for their child’s non-attendance within three years. It is a drive that is faltering.
In the same week in London, the Department for Education released data showing the overall absence rate for the academic year 2025-26 for pupils in England was running at 6.93%, a slight rise on the previous year, and still significantly above the 2018-19 pre-Covid levels when the national overall absence rate in England was just 4.7%. Persistent absence rates have doubled since the pandemic, with nearly one in five children now missing at least 10% of school. In Margate, the magistrates listened as a representative for Kent county council told the court that a girl’s parents had been fined a year earlier, for taking her with them while they made a time-term trip abroad for dental treatment, and also the year before that when they had taken an unauthorised holiday during school time.
The father countered that his daughter had done some work on his iPad while they were away and showed no sign of having fallen behind; he was annoyed, he added, that staff from the primary school appeared to be monitoring his social media posts to track his movements, which he felt was a breach of his privacy. After some discussion with the magistrates, he accepted he was guilty, and was issued with a £166 fine. A record 492,825 penalty notices for unauthorised absences were issued to parents in England in 2024-25 (the most recent year for which records are available), a slight increase on the year before and a sharp rise from the pre-Covid level of 333,388 penalties in 2018-19.
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