Term-time holidays: Where most children were absent_BBC News

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This story was published by BBC News on 27 of March with the headline ‘Holidays behind 25% of school absences’. The story continued by informing that ‘the number of school days lost due to family holidays in term time is rising’ and that ‘it accounted for a quarter of unauthorised absences from schools in England’. The article was published following the concern that some families saw going away during term-time as an entitlement and as such fines (60$ per child) were not deterrent enough. The data used to support the establishment of more strict rules is taken from the reports published by the Department for Education, however, there seems to be bias in how the values and information is selected for the article.

 

Accordingly, my first critique to this article is that there is a contradiction between the percentage given in the short headline which is 25% and the percentage given latter on in the story which is 27%. The right value is the one which is claimed in the headline ‘holidays behind 25% of school absences’ because is an approach of the results taken from national statistics reported by the Department for Education. However, in their report 24.7% refers to the total sum of percentages of unauthorised absences, including other reasons. The headline seems to give more importance to absences due to family holidays (which is only 6.7%), when the reason that most contributes to the overall percentage is ‘other unauthorised circumstances’, being 15.1% out of the total unauthorised absences.

 

Moreover, if we look at the report by the Department for Education we see that the most common reason for absence is illness which accounts for the 57.3% of all absences. This means that the headline of the article ‘term-time holidays: where most children were absent’ is misleading.

 

Following with the same observation, the second critique is that the information needs to be contextualised. This is important for the broader picture because according to the main data source, overall absence rate has remained broadly stable since 2014/15 and have followed generally downward trend since 2006/07. This would mean that actually the increase of absences due to not agreed family holidays is not as detrimental as the article tries to show. In addition, the percentage of unauthorised absences have decreased from 55.7 in 2014/15 to 53.8 in 2015/16. This means that if we only look at the regions selected for the article, we are given just a piece of information. Since those regions are selected in accordance to their biggest percentage rise in term-time family holidays we cannot consider them to be representative enough of the whole England. The article should have included regions where the rates of student absence is lower.

 

Another information that is not told in the article is the number of students that have been enrolled last year. As it is described in the report, the absence rates are affected by the number of students enrolled each year. This would mean that since the number of students has increased from 6,411,085 in 2011 to 6,737,190 in 2016, the values presented have increased as well.

 

All in all, this article could have been more specific in its claims because the data source  used is not biased but the conclusions extracted from it can be misleading if important information is omitted.

 

Source:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-39380529

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/602320/SFR14_2017_Text.pdf

 

 

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