In relation to parents being fined for taking their children out of school for holidays during term time, for each school year from September 1 2015 to present date – including where possible how many have been handed out during the current 2022/23 school year – please kindly provide data on the number of unauthorised absences, meaning days.
Further, in each school year from September 1 2015 to present date – including where possible how many have been handed out during the current 2022/23 school year – please provide data on the number of fines you have issued.
Further, in each school year from September 1 2015 to present date – including where possible how many have been handed out during the current 2022/23 school year – please provide the number of parents you have prosecuted for non-payment of said fines.
Further, please can you also break all of the above data down into primary and secondary schools
We can confirm the following information up until 3rd May 2023:
| School year | Total unauthorised absences (days) for term-time holidays | Total number of fines | Total number of prosecutions |
| 2015/16 | 0 | 974 | 154 |
| 2016/17 | 2917.5 days | 538 | 161 |
| 2017/18 | 14363.5 days | 1993 | 0 |
| 2018/19 | 15792.5 days | 2210 | 3 |
| 2019/20 | 10400.5 days | 1354 | 8 |
| 2020/21 | 628 days | 84 | 6 |
| 2021/22 | 6617.5 days | 848 | 106 |
| 2022/23 | 9827.5 days | 1290 | 157 |
| Total | 60547 days | 9291 | 595 |
We should clarify that we cannot break down the information into primary or secondary schools as this would require reviewing each individual case to establish the age of the child. Given the number of cases referred to in the table above, this would take longer than 18 hours and, pursuant to section 12 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000, we are therefore not obliged to provide this information.
Similarly, we do not hold the data for number of days for the 2015/16 academic year as this wasn’t recorded at the time, so without going through the 974 individual files referred to above we cannot extract the requested data.