Q: Half term is coming up and we're planning to go on holiday, but many of the mums at my son's school are taking their children out of school the week before to make the most of the cheap holiday deals available in term time. This seems wrong to me: putting their children's education second. Am I being an old stickler, or is it okay to take children out of school during term time?

To respond to this question with anything other than an unequivocal 'No!' is to invite accusations of gross irresponsibility.

Headteachers rightly take a tough line with parents who will not or cannot ensure that their children attend school. The Government is trying to work with the travel industry to end the temptation of very cheap holidays being offered in school time. We all shudder with horror at stories of kids picked up by the police or truancy officers when they are out shopping with their parents.

Obviously enough, children who are not in school are missing teaching. The longer and/or more frequent their absences, the harder it will be for them to catch up. This is particularly the case in subjects like mathematics and modern languages where learning is sequential – children who miss out on one stage of the teacher's explanation may never be able to make much sense of subsequent explanations. But it is true in any subject, and the evidence is that children, for very understandable reasons, tend to absent themselves from lessons they find difficult.

Truancy, in other words, can be a slippery slope, and the parent who takes advantage of a wonderful holiday offer may in a few years' time find themselves asking whether they were to blame for the fact that their son or daughter has ended up failing most of their GCSEs.

These truths cannot be emphasised strongly enough. There are, though, other truths. Some families cannot afford the high costs of holidays taken during school holidays. If the family is to holiday together, the children have to miss school. I am not, I'm afraid, going to dismiss the importance of a family holidaying together out of hand. It may be more important for a child to spend time with its mother and father, than it is for them to attend school.

And some holidays, of course, can be very educational – more educational, perhaps, than a week's mechanistic drilling for National Curriculum tests.

Parents should do all they can to avoid their children missing a day of school. Ultimately, though, it is they who must decide, not the headteacher or the Secretary of State for Education.

The parent who recklessly and repeatedly colludes with or causes their child to miss school should in the last resort be punished by the courts. The parent who decides that it is in their child's interests to go on a family holiday, and who takes the trouble to find out what teaching the child will miss so that gaps can be plugged is, in my view, taking their responsibilities seriously.

Big-brother state does not always know best. We should assume that the vast majority of parents care about their child's education. In my experience, it is a tiny minority who do not. Parents must behave responsibly, but schools should respect a carefully thought-through decision and work with the parents to minimise the discontinuities to the child's education.

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