Parents should utilise school holidays, Gove believes

Parents looking to go on camping trips have been encouraged to only do so during permitted school holidays, in a bid to improve attendance rates.

Guardian.co.uk reports that the education secretary Michael Gove is to banish so-called "authorised absences", which allow head teachers to grant school children up to two weeks of absence a year.

It is a time when many families are thought to embark on holidays both in the UK and abroad. This is despite the fact that the discretionary absence is actually intended to cover illness, bad weather and bereavements.

Telegraph.co.uk says that some parents prefer to use  these authorised absences as a time to holiday because taking trips during the school breaks can be an expensive business.

However, it is thought that around 4.5 million days of schooling are lost every year thanks to this kind of truanting. Of these, figures show that head teachers authorised around three-quarters of the requests.

While the information reported on is based on an inside leak, a source at the Department for Education commented: "Any time out of school has the potential to damage a child's education. That is why the government will end the distinction between authorised and unauthorised absence."