Being threatened with fines for children’s absence is causing “damage and trauma” to already-struggling families, says Motherland star Anna Maxwell Martin.
Last year nearly 500,000 fines were issued to families across England for unauthorised school absences, 32,000 of which were for non-holiday-related unauthorised absence.
Maxwell Martin is the co-executive producer of a new short film, Unauthorised Absence, that depicts the worst-case scenario from the fine system for parents of children struggling at school with unmet additional or mental health needs.
It’s an issue of personal significance for her.
“We went through this as a family, and we were facing the idea of fines and court and exclusion and off-rolling, and it was really devastating for our family when we were in a time of huge vulnerability and crisis,” says Maxwell Martin.
In the film, a single mother (played by Emily Bruni) faces repeated calls and voicemails from a teacher (Maxwell Martin, in voice only) at nine-year-old daughter Thea’s school. Thea (Beatrice Flaherty), who we learn is stuck on the waiting list for child and adolescent mental health services, refuses to go to school and becomes distraught to the point of hurting her mother and herself when her mother tries to get her there.
Without a diagnosis, her mother goes through the levels of enforcement despite her protests - she’s fined, asked to go on a parenting course and threatened with prosecution. As she tries for a final time to drag a clearly overwhelmed Thea into school, events take a tragic turn.
How absence fines can affect families
It’s an extreme version of events, but the film’s creators are keen to show the current enforcement system’s potential for harm.
Our current attendance laws have been the reason why “many families have fallen off the cliff in the education system”, says Jo Clayton, the film’s writer.
After dealing with the system herself, Clayton, who is the parent of a child with special educational needs and disabilities, also drew on the testimonies of many other affected families as she wrote the screenplay.
The team also reached out to heads and teachers with the script to see if it felt reflective of what they see day to day, says producer Natalie Lauren, who previously worked in education for a decade, particularly supporting children outside of mainstream.
For some teachers watching the film, it might feel like Thea’s school and the staff who work there seem to have little empathy for the situation Thea and her mother are in.
However, the filmmakers say they aren’t intending to place blame on schools.
“In the film, no single one person is at fault and I hope that comes through really clearly,” Lauren says. “You see that it’s the bureaucratic pressure that the teachers are under, that the school is under, that the parents and the health service are under, and that all results in the awful thing that happens in the film.”
Both Clayton and Lauren feel like a “schools versus parents” narrative is often created - both in the media and because of the system itself.
Schools are held accountable for attendance, and are required to consider a fine when a child has missed 10 or more sessions unauthorised within a 10 week period.
And a Vlog investigation earlier this year found that school leaders felt that the government expects them to be both “empathetic and uncompromising” on attendance. Data also suggested that schools in some areas are intervening to prevent a hardline approach being taken on prosecution for non-attendance and failure to pay fines.
‘Incredible’ teachers
Maxwell Martin agrees that the system often forces parents and schools into an adversarial relationship, but she does not hold this against teachers.
“There are teachers who I could cry thinking about the support they’ve given my children,” she says.
“They are often teachers that my children sought out that were not assigned to them because one of my children couldn’t get anyone assigned to her. They sought them out because they were kind and compassionate people who had such an abundance of active listening.
“I can never thank those teachers enough. They do an incredible job, they need to be paid more and we need to value them more, along with our [teaching assistants].”
Since the pandemic, schools have been dealing with an absence crisis that is only recently starting to improve. Children with SEND are significantly more likely to be persistently or severely absent.
The number of fines issued to parents for absence has been increasing since Covid, and usage of attendance case management has also increased.
Meanwhile, the number of pupils with SEND has continued to rise to more than 1.8 million in 2025-26, and over half a million children and young people are currently on a waiting list for mental health support. According to BMA analysis, as of May 2026 more than 90,000 of them had waited more than 78 weeks for first contact.
Unauthorised Absence was released last Wednesday, in the same week Maxwell Martin and the film’s creators joined parent campaigners to deliver a petition to Downing Street calling for absence fines to be scrapped. It received more than 300,000 signatures.
It also comes as big changes to SEND system in England are anticipated under the programme of reform put forward by the previous Labour administration.
Some schools have raised concerns that the reforms could make the system even more adversarial. From 2029 onwards, schools will become responsible for the support plans of most students with SEND, as well as being responsible for handling complaints about support, adding to the existing workload around growing numbers of parent complaints.
The government hopes that the SEND reforms will allow the needs of more children to be met in mainstream schools, meaning they can attend their local school. It also hopes to boost attendance by improving alternative provision.
But the film’s creators want to see changes to the absence system, regardless of needs.
“There may be a tiny percentage of parents who deserve to go into the criminal system, but the numbers going in now - it’s horrific,” Clayton says.
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