The cost of family holidays during school holidays that has resulted in an e-petition of protest to Parliament signed by 170,000 people has stirred up the issue of taking children out of school during term time.

The petitioners want the Coalition Government to cap the holiday industry’s percentage increases on holiday prices during official school holidays.

Education Secretary Michael Gove wants parents to be more proactive in lobbying their children’s schools to change their term times so that children can go on holiday at different times throughout the year without jeopardising their education.

Tour operators say they are merely responding to the law of supply and demand rather than taking advantage of parents. But Mr Gove said the industry to “look at itself in the mirror” and ask itself whether enough was being done to help its customers.

At the end of May, travel agent Stephen Howard marks 25 years of business in Wibsey High Street. He acts as an agent for tour operators and agrees that during school holidays the cost of a package holiday for a family of four, say, is liable to cost between £200 and £300 more than it will during term time.

He said: “But it’s like any other industry that works on supply and demand. It’s no different to florists who put up the price of flowers before Valentine’s Day.

“This problem has raised its head over the last two years because the Government has said it will financially penalise parents for taking their children out during term time.

“The Government could reconsider fining parents, but I don’t think they will be able to get tour operators to change.”

Until retiring last year, Mr Howard’s wife, Janet, was for ten years head of Greenside Primary School in Pudsey. He admitted that they used to have interesting discussions on this matter.

“She used common sense, so that if parents approached her with a view to tagging on a couple of extra days at half-term, or if there had been illness in the family, my wife took a sympathetic approach rather than penalise them,” he added.

A recent poll found that 51 per cent of parents of children under the age of 18 questioned, would take their offspring out of school during term time if by doing so they could get a significantly cheaper holiday.

But 49 per cent of those polled thought that parents should not be able to remove children from school at any time of their choosing.

Children being whipped off in term-time for holidays has been a problematic feature of education in Bradford for many years.

Bradford Council figures show that between September 2012 and Easter last year, for example, more than 41,000 school days were lost throughout the district in this way.

Parents who do this without the agreement of the school concerned risk facing hefty fines of £60 per parent per child. Failure to pay on time can result in a fine of up to £1,000 in Magistrates Court.

When Keith Thomson was head of Grange School between 1974 and 1989, many of his pupils came from families of South Asian origin.

He said: “We had Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims from Bangladesh and from Pakistan. It seemed important to me for youngsters to keep contact with their history and relatives.

“My pupils were over 13, so the English language was embedded. If they went away for two months, we’d give them things to do while they were away, such as write an essay describing the geography of the place they were visiting or work out the distance they were travelling.

“For children of primary school age, missing two months might put them back a bit.

“The only problem I had was if a young girl was taken away and didn’t come back. Other than that, the only objection I had was families going on a gratuitous jolly to Disneyland in the middle of February. The educational opportunities in a visit to Disneyland seemed to me restricted.”

When Mr Thomson was a headteacher, running schools was a relatively straight forward matter. The Council did that for the vast majority of first, second and middle schools and arranged the same holiday periods for all establishments.

Under Michael Gove’s new system of free schools and academies, however, arranging holidays is more problematic – especially for parents with children in different types of school.