From the BBC:
Fining parents for taking children out of school in term time in Wales has had no effect on overall absence rates, a review has found. It shows the number of unauthorised family holidays actually increased after fixed penalty notices were introduced in 2013...
Several respondents said that the level of the fine was too low to encourage behavior change. They said this was particularly the case for unauthorised absences for holidays in term time because some parents preferred to pay a £60 fine compared to the price of going away in the school holidays.
One respondent said "in this deprived area many families cannot afford the costs of a holiday out of term time. If they can, they soak up the cost of the fine as part of the holiday cost (which means the fine has zero effect)".
This phenomonen was mentioned in the book 'Freakonomics', here's an article from 2013 explaining it:
In Haifa, day care centers almost uniformly closed at 4pm, and simply depended on the good intentions of parents to pick up their kids on time. Somehow, this worked: parents picked up their children on time and rarely, if ever, came after 4:30pm.
Why were parents rarely late? As Uri will tell you in our book, being late meant relying on the generosity of one teacher, who would inevitably stay late to look after your child. Being late meant facing that same teacher and having to apologize to her for the inconvenience of waiting.
All of which prompted us to wonder: what would happen if these day care centers stopped relying on generosity and started relying on a financial incentive — like a fine — to discourage parents from showing up late? Few would have predicted what we found: introducing a financial penalty for showing up late actually caused parents to do just that. Parents stopped showing up on time entirely.
To come to our surprising conclusion, Uri ran an experiment: Out of 10 daycare centers across Haifa, they randomly chose six and introduced a small fine for parents who showed up more than 10 minutes late in each of them. In day cares where the fine was introduced, parents immediately started showing up late, with tardiness levels eventually leveling out at about twice the pre-fine level. That is, introducing a fine caused twice as many parents to show up late. What about the remaining four day care centers that remained fine-free? Tardiness didn’t change at all.
The picture that emerged from this experiment, co-authored with Aldo Rustichini, was that parents had a whole set of non-financial incentives for being on time – incentives that were completely incompatible with money. Like, for example, avoiding the guilt of inconveniencing the day care workers. As soon as parents had the option to pay a small fine and avoid that guilt, they took it en masse.
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