Starting next week, a headteacher will begin handing down fines to parents who refused to send their children back to classrooms.
According to Tina Wilkinson, the headteacher of St. Andrew's Primary School in Lancashire, 25 students were absent despite her repeated warnings of penalties.
Hefty fine
Mrs. Wilkinson told DailyMail that her school has a historical problem with attendance and has enforced a zero-tolerance approach, even if it does not make her "popular."
The fines are doled out after five absent days. This means that the parents have until September 8 to either send their children to school, register to home-school, or face the hefty fine.
While Mrs. Wilkinson does not agree with the concept of fining, the headteacher of 17 years conceded that they are effective. She insisted robust measures were in place to make classrooms COVID-secure, but she remained sympathetic to the fears weighing on parents.
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Millions of pupils across England and Wales return to school this September, and some parents are worried about the presence of the virus, and they have chosen to home-school their children.
One mother from Suffolk, Kerrie Stanford, revealed that she was planning to educate her two children from home for the next two years as she was afraid of the prospect of falling ill with the coronavirus.
Usually, children can only be absent if they are sick or if they have prior permission from the headteacher and Education Secretary Gavin Williamson has said fines would be handed down as a "last resort."
Parents will be fined £60 if their children are marked with an unauthorized absence, it will be £120 if the fine is not paid within three weeks, with the threat of prosecution if the charges are continually avoided, as reported by WalesOnline.
Parents can home-school their children but must communicate this plan with the local authority to remove them from the school's register.
However, Mrs. Wilkinson said that her school had parents who wanted their child to remain registered yet still keep them at home. She told ITV's This Morning that from their point of view, they do have a problem with attendance, and a lot of the children don't come to school regularly.
Wilkinson said that the move is not fair to them and to the teachers when they are trying to get things done, and they attend classes regularly at school.
The headteacher added that efforts had been ramped up to protect students from the risk of contamination, including hand-washing stations, giving children their own packs, pedal bins, and scrapping whole-school assemblies.
School safety
Similar measures to make schools safe have been adopted by teachers across the UK as millions of students will return to school.
However, some parents are still unconvinced about the standards of safety and are opting for home-schooling.
The rate of infections in the UK started in March, and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson made his decision to close the schools.
Sending children back to school became a national priority for the government as the pandemic began to wane, and the country lifted the lockdown.
