Supreme court rules father must pay fine for taking daughter out of school During term time

The Supreme Court released its verdict on the 6th April 2017 on the ability of parents to take their children out of school to go on holiday during term-time – this relates to the Isle of Wight case. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled in favour of the DfE case that it is against the regulations to take children out of school. The crux of their ruling is section 444(1) of the Education Act 1996 which requires children to attend regularly. They have interpreted this as meaning that children have to attend “in accordance with the attendance rules”. They did not accept that this requirement could be interpreted to mean that children could be taken out of class if, overall, they had a high attendance rate over the course of a year.
 
This ruling therefore highlights the need for better guidance from DfE which allows schools a degree of flexibility in considering requests from parents to take children from school during term-time.