The state will prosecute you for a holiday. It won’t act when your child loses a parent.

Two enforcement systems. The same four words — “best interests of the child.” And a ratio of 7,356 to one that tells you everything about whose relationships the state actually values.CA

Last year, the government sent 492,800 penalty notices to parents across England for taking their children on a term-time holiday. Nearly half a million families — fined, threatened with criminal records, some prosecuted. The law fires automatically at five days of unauthorised absence. And it works.

In the same period, family courts made 67 enforcement orders in cases where a parent was blocking a child’s contact with their other parent entirely.

Sixty-seven. The ratio between those two numbers is 7,356 to one. No government department has ever published it. The figures have been sitting in the public domain for years — one in a Department for Education release, the other buried in Ministry of Justice data last updated in 2016. Nobody has been required to put them in the same sentence. Until now.

7,356:1

“For every enforcement action taken to protect a child’s relationship with their parent, 7,356 were taken to protect their attendance at school.”

Calculated from DfE Parental Responsibility Measures 2024–25 and MoJ Family Court Statistics. Never previously published.

Why schools enforce so hard

Ask any headteacher why they issue penalty notices and the answer is immediate: because consistent attendance creates a meaningful impact on a child’s life. The teacher who knows your child’s name. The routine that builds confidence. The relationship that forms over months and years of showing up. Schools push hard on presence because presence matters.

That logic is absolutely right. Regular, consistent presence is how you shape a child’s future. Now apply it honestly to parents.

If showing up — being present, being a constant in a child’s life — is what creates a meaningful impact on their development, what exactly are we saying to the father permitted only every other weekend? How does a mother who sees her child for 52 days a year — just 14% of that child’s life — make the kind of meaningful impact that shapes who her child becomes?

The school gets 380 days. The parent gets 52. When the school loses five of those days, the full force of criminal law fires. When a parent is cut off from their child entirely — when a child loses a parent’s daily presence, encouragement, and belief in them — the court writes a new order it already knows will not be enforced, and everyone goes home.

How 52 days became the ceiling

The law governing contact after separation never specifies how much time a child is entitled to with their non-resident parent. Parliament deliberately refused to set a minimum. The only guidance is that a parent should be involved in ‘some kind’ of way — no floor, no guaranteed baseline.

Into that space, courts created their own unofficial standard. The only major national study of contact cases found every other weekend as the outcome in 43% of disputed cases — not because evidence supported it, but because it had become professional habit. A solicitor told researchers: ‘You always start from once a fortnight.’ A judge expected ‘at least a good weekend every other weekend.’

And there the conversation ended. Every other weekend didn’t become a minimum to build from. It became a ceiling. Ask for more time with your child and you risk being described as demanding.

Enforcement orders 2016

67

From 6,000+ applications — a 1.1% success rate

Cases “resolved” by new order

62%

The court restarts a process that already failed

Average wait for final order

44 wks

70 weeks in London — a contact sentence before any judge decides

When orders are broken

Between 2011 and 2016, the number of parents applying to enforce contact orders nearly tripled — from 2,000 to over 6,000 a year. Over the same period, the rate at which courts enforced those orders fell to just over one per cent. A politician told the House of Commons that parental involvement could, in the worst cases, “amount to a birthday card or a Christmas card.”

The legal tools to do better exist. Courts have powers of contempt, financial penalties, the ability to change living arrangements entirely. A Court of Appeal ruling has explicitly stated that courts have a legal duty to enforce contact orders. Yet an independent study found that in 62% of enforcement cases, the court’s response was to issue a new, equally unenforceable order. The duty is acknowledged. It is not exercised.

What the science tells us

A long-running UK birth cohort study tracking children from birth found that father absence in the first five years nearly doubled the probability of that child suffering depression at age 24. A separate national study found significant school absence doubled the odds of mental health problems at ages 7, 11, and 14. The two findings are almost identical in scale. The policy response to these near-identical findings is 7,356 to one.

In December 2024, the Family Justice Council — the most senior advisory body to the family courts — formally classified the deliberate removal of a parent from a child’s life as harm ‘akin to other forms of emotional and psychological child abuse.’ The enforcement system responded with 67 orders from 6,000 applications. If any other officially classified form of child abuse were being addressed at a 1.1% intervention rate, it would be a national scandal.

There is a harder irony still. Research shows that a parent’s belief in their child’s potential is the single most powerful predictor of how that child performs at school — stronger than tutoring, stronger than school quality. A child cut off from a parent who cares about their future loses something no classroom can replace. The machine that prosecutes school absences may, in part, be collecting the consequences of the contact system that allowed a parent to disappear from that child’s life years earlier.

The reform going in the wrong direction

Parliament is considering a bill that would remove the only legal presumption that children benefit from having both parents involved in their lives. The stated reason — that courts developed a culture that sometimes put domestic abuse victims at risk — contains real merit. But the proposed solution removes the presumption without fixing enforcement. Courts will have less reason to order contact. Parents who block contact will face the same near-zero consequences as before.

The government’s own minister described parenthood as ‘a privilege not a right.’ Said to a parent who has spent years fighting just to be part of their child’s life, those words are the double standard in its purest form.

The answer is not to remove the presumption and leave the system broken. It is to fix both at once: a minimum contact standard, an automatic enforcement duty, and an end to the 44-week average wait that entrenches every other weekend before any judge has decided anything.

The question that remains

The state knows exactly how to build enforcement systems that work. It built one for school attendance, and it fires nearly half a million times a year. The question that 7,356 to one forces us to answer is this: what does it say about our values that we will prosecute a parent for taking their child to the seaside for five days — but watch in near-silence as that same child is cut off from one of their parents for years?

Both absence and presence matter. Schools know it. Science confirms it. The law, as it stands, appears to have been forgotten.

CourtCraft Advocate provides practical, evidence-based guidance for separated parents navigating contact enforcement, documentation, and court proceedings.

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